Welcome to Gaia! ::

Pendour was used to people staring. There were the scars, of course, and she knew that it went beyond that when she was powered up like this. Her dress was made to catch eyes, she knew, and on top of that, she glowed.

Often she shied away from the attention, and after a few more moments she probably would have slipped away wordlessly, with only the smallest smile as a goodbye, but what the girl said caught her attention.

"It's not drugs," she said, her smile inching sideways in amusement, because that wasn't something that she'd heard before. "It's magic. See?"

She held out an arm so that the girl could see the glowing markings across the pockmarked skin, something no tattoo would be able to mimic.

"I'm a Knight. That's the title for it." She didn't love the terminology, but it was the easiest way to explain.

"I serve something called the Code, and nurture a place up on the planet Neptune, and in exchange, I have certain abilities."

She could only speak of her own experiences. She didn't know what it was, exactly, that the girl had seen.

"You think about what it felt like, when it happened to you before," said Pendour, with the ease of someone who had done it a thousand times before. "And then, you, um, call on that. You pull it over yourself, like it's a piece of clothing."

In some ways, maybe, it was. The magic seemed so deeply tied to the clothes that they worse.

She remembered when she'd started out as a Page, remembered how she'd found Camelot and asked if what she'd stumbled into made her some kind of terrorist. It was confusing, she knew. It felt like so much.

If she could help at all, sharing her own experiences, she would.

And if someone else was going on, and the girl wasn't a Page, she'd do what she could do help with that, too.

Pendour's soft smile widened as the girl's clothes shifted, and her aura bloomed. "I told you it wasn't drugs," she said, and there was nothing even remotely teasing about her tone, just a gentle honesty. She didn't recognize the style of her clothes right away, or the symbols that she was wearing, but all the same, it was clearly a flesh-and-blood Knight standing before her.

"You feel, too," she said, and she closed her eyes to bask in that fact, for a moment, to really let herself experience the aura. Her fingers fluttered in front of her, as if it was almost something she could feel with her hands. It might have been a smaller aura, a new one, but it was no less beautiful for that.

"You feel like a warm fire on a winter's day. Like light in the darkness."

She opened her eyes again. "It's the magic you carry, that all Knights do. We can sense each other, when we're like this."

There was a moment's pause.

"And sense the darker things, too."

"The monsters," said Pendour, with a small nod, although she paused for longer than might have been strictly necessary at the young Page's question.

"Common," said Pendour, because that was true enough. If she really went out of her way to look, she could find a youma or an agent most nights. "Not normal. They're corruptions of things, and there are people who are corrupted, too."

Images flashed across her mind of cracks in chest, of souls splintering into slivers, of pale corpses in alleyways, on rooftops.

It wasn't something she had to dump on this girl, though, not so soon. Not when she didn't even know what she was getting into, or if she wanted to get into it.

"It's a choice, if you, um, want to do anything at all going forwards," she said. "But you have the powers now to work on fixing certain things, if you want to. The corruption here, or the Wonder, the place, that your magic is tied to."

"Well, not common as in everywhere, but they are around," said Pendour, tangling her fingers in her pale hair and feeling, not for the first time, like she didn't have all the answers. "They're good at hiding when they don't want to be seen."

She did remember to look at least briefly, at the girl's face.

"It's okay to have questions. It's good practice, for the journalism," which could maybe even tie back around into the powered side of things, "And it's a lot, at first. I remember."

She glanced upwards as she let herself get pulled away by those memories. "My story started almost exactly like yours. It was years ago now. Um, five, maybe? I was chased by one of the monsters, found this," she brought her ocarina to her hand, "Turned into this," she ran fluttering fingers over the silks of her skirt. "I managed to power up again and to find someone to tell me the basics of what had happened. He was sweet as sweet, and very helpful, but after that I was still curious. I wanted to meet other people like me, to hear their perspectives and stories, and so I kept coming back out. I talked. I made friends. I learned about my Wonder and decided to try to fix it. I met some of the corrupted ones, too, and their stories made me sad enough that I wanted to see what I could do to help."

And then one of them had taken her eye for the crime of calling him broken, of offering that help, and then she'd sat in bed depressed for a year before coming back out and starting all the way over, from the beginning.

"They're dangerous, though," she decided to add. "If you eve want to go that route, be careful."

“The auras will help you,” said Pendour, and it was only a moment later that she realized that the words coming out of her mouth sounded like something that an ancient, cryptic messenger would say in an old story.

“The energy that you feel, like you feel now, that’s coming off of people. That’s the word for it. It can tell you if someone is corrupted or not, if they’re powerful or not. If you’re going to remember one thing, remember that.”

The girl was bubbling with questions, but the answers, Pendour knew, would come in time. She just needed to know enough to keep her alive for a while.

“And I could talk for hours about Wonders,” she said, with a sigh that was almost dreamy. “They’re our places in space. Which is another thing that takes a while to wrap your mind around, but I can show you sometime.”

"Next week," agreed Pendour, easily enough. Of course she would have done what she could to help any lost young Page that she came across, but it was sweet as sweet, when this one said that she wanted to be friends.

Pendour wanted that too, she thought.

"We'll meet here, and then go to Neptune. I'll show you," she said.

She'd like the waterfalls, she thought, and with how worked up she already seemed about all of this magic, this new Knighthood, maybe she would appreciate the peace.