Welcome to Gaia! ::

She had been pleasantly surprised by how quickly her call for Wonders to visit had been answered, although the pleasure was tempered by her uneasiness at having made the call in the first place.

Why bother? It wasn't a question she could answer, or at least not one that she could look at straight enough to answer honestly - and if there was one thing Joy hated more than lying, it was lying to herself. Who could she possibly owe more honesty to?

She didn't want to care, but she did. The chaos of the storms was over; her Wonder was once again locked away from her, and she cared.

She had felt a little sick, the first time she had taken a visitor with her to the Garde. She hoped vaguely that she was not going to be the cause of similar sensations in the Knight that she was now traveling to meet, but it wouldn't matter much. For reasons she did not want to examine and therefore didn't, she felt a little sick herself anyway.

She shifted uneasily as she felt herself approaching the energy signature of another. No time to back out now. So she put on a bright smile - not a lie, an effort of self-discipline - and called out as she approached: "Should I have brought a swimsuit? Or maybe scuba gear?"

"I've got a bikini in subspace if things get dire," she said, cheerfulness returning at the prospect of the swimsuit getting some use and at her accidentally showing some preparedness. Maybe there'd even be white sand - tides - who knew? The appearance of the woman before her certainly suggested as much.

She put her hand into hers, giving it simultaneously the sort of professional handshake one might give at the beginning of a very important job interview, and did not make any bones about giving Pendour a once-over, with an appraising eye for both her appearance and her costume. But the appraisal, apparently, was positive: "You're a real stunner," she said, her voice full of admiration. "We should be - you've seen that meme? - maximizing our joint slay. Let's go," she added, the smile coming a bit more naturally this time. "I'm ready."

She was silent for a long time, her eyes roaming here and there with that same air of appraisal. But it was subdued, this time - almost bizarrely melancholy - and when she finally spoke, her voice was strange.

“Most beautiful thing I've ever seen,” she said. “And I grew up in the most beautiful place in the world.”

She hesitated, her eyes wandering to the view of the waterfalls and then back towards the expanse above them. “Is it - is it alive? It's too beautiful to not be alive,” she said. “But I thought that about mine, too, the first time I showed up.”

“I do want to swim, yes,” she said firmly. “But please show me around, if you don't mind. Show me whatever you think is best to see. I'd kick myself if I missed it. Show me what's alive,” she added, almost impulsively. “I just - they seem so desolate sometimes, the way people describe them, you know?”

She cast her eyes, again, around the general splendor, and kept talking even as she made a “lead the way” gesture. “I don't think this place could ever feel that way. Did it ever feel desolate to you?”

She moved very carefully around the beds, afraid of disturbing the tender work, although she leaned down to gently touch a blossom here or there.

"Mine had plants - too many, really. Choking everything, felt like. But they felt - feel - hostile, you know? Not like this." She paused. "I was never much for gardening. But there's flowers. Not many. Came back on their own, but still a little unruly - coming up over ruins, all scraggly, like they're trying to pull them down. It's more the lack of animate things that makes my skin crawl, I guess. The way it's so quiet. Having water helps," she added, with a vague movement of her arm as if to encompass the distant waterfalls. "Anything to make some noise."

She hesitated, watching Pendour's work as she went. "If you have to have a green thumb to get things living again," she said grimly, "mine's gonna have to stay dead. I envy your patience."

“That was before my time. I guess I'm lucky,” she said, with a grim little laugh. “I never had to know what it was like before.” She stooped to eye the beetle with decided fondness as she spoke. “And I guess the advantage of getting one without any real plumbing to speak of is not having to call in a Mauvian. I'm imagining one with a tool belt and a butt crack,” she added, wrinkling her nose as she straightened. “There's a moat - mostly trees in it now - and I think there might have been a couple of fountains at some point.”

She hesitated again, suddenly uneasy. “I'm not even sure why I bother. I guess I feel - obligated, you know? The same way I feel obligated about everything else. But I guess it's nice, that we have little places to run away to every now and again. Maybe if mine is ever as nice as this - but I'm not picking up gardening or plumbing to make it happen, as much as I appreciate your offer. I'd need to pick up too much to restore it to all its former glory - painting and tile work and plaster and everything. Maybe it's enough to just keep the forest from eating it alive. Or eating it dead, I suppose.”

She shifted uncomfortably, remembering Gouvernail and his sudden vehemence that the Garde was a dead place, an interaction that still felt dangerous to think about too closely. This, in turn, made her think of his earlier observation that the place was wrong without seagulls over it. “What's come back for you, besides the beetles? Do you get birds down here, or just - I don't know - fish and things?”

She had been perked up immensely at the prospect of any kind of otter sitting in her lap, actually having made a sort of strangled squeal of delight at the prospect, and so the manifestation of the Wonder’s resident ghost had startled her, but at first not unpleasantly.

She had assumed, she realized, that Pendour was one of those without a ghost at all - habituated to Nail’s ever-present and scrupulously formal attention on her arrivals and departures. And so she had, at first, turned towards the ephemeral stranger a smile of radiant pleasure - all the angst of her thoughts about Gouvernail’s existence distant from her mind - which had been almost instantly wiped away by his greeting.

She flinched inwardly, trying not to betray that she had heard it at all. And what a name, too - no generic Emily or Katherine, but something so distinctive, popped out in exactly the way she had been a little terrified Gouvernail might, when she had had visitors to the Garde. But the thought barely had time to take root, displaced first by his cold demeanor and then by her quick glance to Pendour’s face and her almost inexplicable reaction.

What could there be to protect her from? The wild thought flashed across her mind that maybe this one had some means of crossing the threshold between worlds, and it was almost enough to overwhelm any other idea. But the simpler explanation was, she assumed, the correct one: that it was a thoughtless movement, and one that was somewhat ominous in its implications.

She thought briefly of Ekstrom, and shoved the worrying idea aside.

“Oh,” she said, restoring her smile as rapidly and completely as she was able. “Hello. Sorry I didn't notice you before.”

For reasons she could not quite articulate, she reached out to touch the back of Pendour's hand, some gesture of reassurance motivated by an instinct she could not name, the simple response to her pale face.

At first, the little harangue didn't seem much worse than what she'd been subjected to during her first couple of visits to the Garde - and was still sometimes subjected to, last visit notwithstanding.

But then Irving had taken a personal tack, and his tone - his tone was the sort of thing, especially from a man and directed at a woman (Pendour's cryptic comment cast aside for the moment, almost unnoticed), that made Joy's hackles go up. It was the kind of tone that Gouvernail, in fact, had only assayed towards her once - worse, really, as Nail's contempt had never had that edge of outright hostility in it.

And he would never - she knew this, somehow - have said any of it in front of someone else. It was a petty little power play, trying to belittle her not just in her own eyes but in the eyes of others, and Joy knew a power play when she saw it.

Perhaps it would have been kinder to simply allow Pendour to lead her away and let the interaction pass without bringing further fire down. But Joy was not always very kind. She was often, instead, temperamental.

"Earth still stands because people like the current Knight of Pendour helped save it," she snapped. "You could be floating around in a big cosmic snake belly right now, Casper, if it weren't for her and people like her. And in front of a guest! Uncultured as well as ungrateful. Maybe all they taught men in that Academy was how to be lecturing swine, but in that case I'm glad we have to strike out for ourselves and do everything without a classroom, or with half-useless mentors more concerned with tearing us down than helping us. At least it keeps us from embarrassing ourselves in front of strangers like you just did."

Not kind at all. A more circumspect, less selfish person might have realized that this ran the risk of only fueling future problems for Pendour, but Joy had always been selfish, had always been too quick to indulge her sense of righteous anger, and more than that, always convinced that it was more important to model that kind of snapping back than it was to think of someone's big-picture peace.