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Blarney was going 'on patrol', for the very first time. What he was patrolling for, or against, he didn't really...know, but he had a vague idea. Monsters bad, regular humans good. Maybe he'd have a chance to save somebody the way he'd been saved by Aruna not that long ago.

But part of him was also very concerned about that eventuality. What if he did come across someone who was in danger, who needed help, who could die if he failed, and he...failed? What if he did a bad job? What if someone got killed or eaten because he didn't know what he was doing yet?

Blarney tightened his grip on his magic stick - his staff, he tried to correct himself, but here in Destiny City, it seemed much more stick-like than staff-ish, as it had seemed at Blarney-the-place, Blarney-the-maybe-it-had-been-a-castle-once. Everything had been special there. Different. Magical.

But in the meantime, Blarney was finding new things to be excited about. Namely: roof-jumping. When he was transformed, he could leap from building to building with all the ease of some kind of oversized, two-legged rabbit. However, rabbits were probably more...graceful than Blarney was: believe it or not, he didn't have a lot of experience with roof-jumping, so about every third roof or so, he'd land but biff it and go sprawling.

With every screw-up, though, he learned something. After the first one, he was expecting to look down and be covered in scrapes and bruises, to be bleeding profusely, but there didn't appear to be a scratch on his actual body, and even his outfit wasn't torn or scratched, barely more than scuffed. He didn't think he was invincible or anything - it did still hurt when he hit the hard cement roof wrong and went flying - but it seemed like his clothes and he himself were harder to get banged up, when he was like this.

Blarney didn't know what he was looking for, but he was looking for something, and he was getting closer. He couldn't really tell if it was a good thing or a bad thing he was chasing down, but it was certainly something, like an internal radar of some kind, some little beep beep in his mind as he got hotter or colder.

A few rooftops later, something lurched and he knew he had found whatever it was he was looking for. He hopped lightly behind an air-conditioner box, giving himself some cover, as he peered around to locate his target.

It appeared to be a woman.

A lady.

She was wearing...an outfit not dissimilar to his own, actually, at least color-wise; what was it Logan had said? His outfit marked him as a Knight of Earth? But now that he was closer he saw that hers was a lot more detailed and involved than his own...she looked a little bit like a queen. A queen of some wild place.

Blarney's heart hammered with excitement along with exertion - he had yet to meet any other Knights, let alone any other Knights of Earth. He'd met a few Senshi, and a talking cat, and an alien or two - but no other Knights, yet.

Maybe tonight was his night.

...So what should he do? He didn't want to get blasted with whatever magic this lady might possess. And he didn't want to be wrong - what if she was a bad guy, actually?

Well, if she was a bad guy, Blarney guessed he'd fight her off, or run for his life, or both. He was powerful now. And if he was right, and she was friendly...the positives outweighed the negatives, Blarney decided, and he stepped around the air conditioner and approached the edge of the roof, allowing himself to be illuminated in the ambient streetlight.

"Uh, hi!" Blarney called, raising his hand to give a little wave. "Everything...um, everything okay on your end? No, um, problems or anything to report?" God, what was he doing? Why was he so nervous? What if the first person like him ended up hating him? He had to make a good impression.

"I'm Blarney, Page of Earth," he added quickly, "and it's nice to meet you!"

"Very!" Blarney chirped back, because there was less than no point in trying to seem any more capable or cool than he was - and he was neither of those things. That he knew for absolutely certain.

"Joyeuse Garde," he repeated, springing down from the roof. Since the dust-up with the youma that he'd been chasing the night he awakened, he found he quite liked the advantage a high point of observation gave him, but she was on the ground, so the ground was probably a safe place to be. At least for the moment. Was it rude to ask what she was named for? It sounded French; Blarney and his sister had taken French, but she was better at it than he was, so he was not about to try and show off language skills that did not exist.

"I'm literally like, brand new." Blarney continued, when he was close enough that he didn't need to shout, but not so close as to be disrespectful or creepy. "Like basically fell off the magic turnip truck yesterday, almost. I mean, not literally, it was more like last week, but yesterday I went to the--I went to Blarney, I guess, and that was so cool, but I tried to go back earlier and basically got a 404 error about it, but like, in my heart. It was so weird." Blarney paused, suddenly aware that he was rambling, which made him cheeks color. "...Sorry. You super didn't ask or need to know all that. I'm just...I haven't met anyone who's on my..." Blarney gestured to the Earth symbol on his chest, and then to the same logos on her dress and...were those shoulder pads? He couldn't tell.

"My team?" Blarney finished lamely. "I don't know the word. Can I ask - you're obviously not new - how did you get into all this?" He thought that was a better question than 'when' - he knew it was impolite to ask a lady her age, and he thought the same might be true for her magical experience. He had many many other questions (would he get a fluffy cape too?), but he forced himself to take it slow. Or, at least as slow as Blarney was physically capable of going. He'd never forgive himself if he chased away his first fellow Earth Knight, just by being 'too much'.

Blarney hurried to fall into step, something about her whole presence making him want to stand up a little straighter, hold himself a little higher. She was shorter than he was - most people were, as he stood at 6'1" when he was using 'good posture' or whatever Madeline called it - but it didn't feel like it. It felt like she was an eight foot tall Amazonian war goddess, and he was a little duckling following her around. Whether he wanted to impress her or be like her, he wasn't sure, but he could feel everything she said writing itself into a gospel in his heart:

1. Thou shalt not say it's a 'quiet night', lest it all go tits up.
2. Thou shalt be on humanity's side.
3. Thou shalt not wander around by yourself and die.

Not a ton of detail, Blarney admitted, but not a bad start, either.

"I don't know who Eath-the-person is," Blarney began, a bit haltingly, as he tried to unravel her philosophical musings, "but...I don't have anyone to wander around with, yet. I don't know how to find someone to do that with, even, and...like you said, the obligation, I can't just...stay home now that I have all this, right?" Blarney held his hands out in front of him, stick and all, showing off his 'armor', such as it was. "If someone got hurt just 'cause I was too scared to leave the house...that wouldn't be right." He glanced at her, trying and failing to read the expression on her face. "What did you do? When you were like me? And how did you get a better weapon? How do I get a better weapon? Not that I don't love my magical stick. Staff. I do, actually, love it, but..." Blarney waved it in front of him, showing off the near-uselessness of it, "I guess it's mostly for the aesthetic right now." What aesthetic that was, he couldn't begin to say.

Blarney nodded slowly, mentally adding an additional point to his Gospel According to Joyeuse Garde:

4. Thou shalt not drive thyself insane by replaying what-ifs and could-haves.

He didn't have any what-ifs or could-haves to replay. He didn't have any near-misses yet, or any successes. He was a clean slate, in that regard, and he was terrified of the day he would need to remember Rule #4, because he knew he would someday, if he didn't hang up his magic stick and never think about it again. It was just the law of averages: you couldn't save everybody. People would get hurt and die regardless, like she said, but...for now, he still had to try. He couldn't give up on this before he even got started, could he? She hadn't, obviously, so why should he, when he hadn't even done anything yet?

You didn't ask for this.

Blarney felt a twinge of guilt, something bubbling up inside him that felt an awful lot like a confession: he wasn't sure he hadn't asked for this, in some subconscious way. He knew that after that first attack, when Aruna had saved him - the logical thing, the safe thing, the smart thing to do would've been to stay home and never think about any of this magic stuff again.

But he hadn't done that. Instead, the attack had triggered some latent thrill-seeking tendencies, some danger-courting behaviors, that until he found his stick and became Blarney, he hadn't even been able to fully justify or explain to himself why he was doing it.

Then he powered up. Then it made sense.

So, wasn't that proof? Wasn't that evidence that on some level, he had wanted this - or something like this - to happen to him? Hadn't he wanted not to feel powerless and afraid for the rest of his life, constantly looking over his shoulder to see nightmare monsters and people with cracked-open foreheads and faces in the shadows?

If he had asked for this - from the universe, from himself, from whoever it was that decided who got to be magic and who didn't - didn't he owe the responsibility that came with being given exactly what he'd wanted? What sort of person would he be, to throw a gift like this away, on the grounds that it wasn't safe for him?

But Joyeuse Garde...he could feel the resentment, the exhaustion, radiating off her like a physical thing, bumping up against his excitement and curiosity for this new life he'd discovered. He didn't know how long she'd been doing this, or what she'd seen in her time, but...he was new, not stupid. He didn't want her to resent him, for the idea that maybe he had had a choice, and maybe he had chosen this, when she'd evidently been volun-told and dragged into the whole mess. He was in no hurry to present any reason for Joyeuse Garde to stop talking to him, and he was reasonably certain that confessing this thought would result in just that - if not something worse, somehow. She had started with a ribbon, but he got the feeling that she was packing something way more powerful now.

So he swallowed it, and focused on the next thing she said instead. While not even in the top five craziest sentences he'd heard this month, it still gave him pause--and, more importantly, something to talk about other than the unexpected, secret bubble of guilt that had bloomed in the pit of his stomach.

"Memories," Blarney said slowly, "...or a ghost?" Blarney blinked at her, a frown creasing his face. "I--I found a ring, yeah," he said quickly, holding up his own hand to show the golden ring with its deep green stone, etched with the symbol of Earth on the band and a stag's head on the jewel. "But I didn't see any ghosts, and I take it you don't mean, like, memories of what I had for dinner last week."

"My Wonder," Blarney repeated, turning the word over in his mind as he said it. So that was what it was called. It didn't seem especially....Wonder-ful right now, but he could see the outline of when it had been, if he squinted. It made him think of the Wonders of the World - the pyramids, and all that - and he felt a funny sort of pride swell in him that he had one of his very own. Blarney, the Wonder.

"You don't have to worry about weirding me out," Blarney said a minute or two later, having nodded along with what she was saying. "The first time--the first time I saw one of those monsters, the youma or whatever they're called, the Senshi who saved me--she explained everything." Blarney paused. "Well, okay, not everything-everything, obviously, but--a lot. Not a lot about Knights, actually, but--as much as she could in one night, anyway. Enough for me to know like...what side I was talking to, if I happened to run into someone on the street--and that required me learning, like, so many new words in a very short amount of time. Did you know--I mean, I guess you probably do, you've been doing this a minute, but did you know there are honest to goodness aliens running around this town?" Blarney shook his head, a marveling tone in his voice.

"So like. Y'know. Once you meet your first alien...why shouldn't there be ghosts and soul-memories or whatever?" Blarney shrugged. "Anyway. I haven't had any memories that aren't mine, and the only other person at Blarney--at my Wonder, I guess--was my sister, 'cause I took her with me. Am I not supposed to do that, by the way? 'Cause oh my god that knocked me out." Blarney gave an overdramatic shudder, clearly hamming it up a little bit - but not by much. "Was that like, magic's way of putting me in a timeout or something? 'Cause I slept for like 18 hours when we got home. Is that gonna happen every time I go? Or only when I bring my sister? 'Cause if everybody's been dealing with that every time they go visit their place...yikes, no wonder it's all been super-dead forever." Blarney wrinkled his nose slightly.

"I tried to go back just by myself when I woke up and it was like--womp womp, no sad dead castle for you, please try again later. I thought maybe it was like, mad at me, or something, but...I still have the ring, and I was still able to come out tonight, so...maybe not?" Blarney shrugged. He had no idea the level of sentience an old abandoned maybe-castle had, or the level of control/permission it had over who visited it when.

From the way Joyeuse was talking, it sure sounded like there was--if not a guy, exactly, a consciousness directing the actions that magic took, and that...unnerved Blarney, a little bit. His...what had she called it? Starseed? His something-or-other had been picked, chosen, by...something, at some point, to become this, maybe because someone way, way back in the McCaffrey family line had...also been picked? That was some kind of circular logic, and it kind of made his head hurt if he thought about it too hard.

"What's your ghost like?" Blarney asked, mostly to distract himself from the growing list of questions forming in his brain that felt like he was beginning to punch above his weightclass. "Is that a question I'm allowed to ask, or is that like, 'oh my god, Blarney, you can't just ask people what their ghosts are like' kinda thing?"

Blarney absolutely beamed as she laughed, his whole face lighting up at the sound. He always loved making people laugh, just in general, but for Joyeuse Garde especially--she had seemed so...hard and distant when he first rolled up, it was a relief that she had a setting other than 'pissed about the general state of things'.

And anyway, another point to add to TGAtJG:

5. Thou shalt not push your limits unnecessarily, lest you succumb to the world's worst hangover.

Blarney had no idea what a hangover felt like - he and Madeline were pathetically well-behaved for children who by all rights should've been near-feral, raising themselves as they were - but if the TV shows and the movies were to be believed, he wanted to experience a magical version of such a thing not at all.

"I've only told one other person," Blarney said, "and she told me her identity first. When she saved me." Blarney frowned slightly - this only confirmed what he'd thought in passing at the time, especially after Halia's reaction when he realized he knew her sister: that it absolutely was not safe for her to be revealing her secret identity to every Mason, Madeline and Harry that showed up needing to be saved from a youma. He made a mental note to talk to her about it - he might need a better analogy than a bubble, but that was as good a place to start as any.

They walked in silence for a few minutes, Blarney turning over everything she'd said, examining it from all sides, spinning it around like it was on a plate in the microwave. Laugh though she had, he got the distinct impression that asking for more detail about her ghost would be pushing his luck, so he let it go, at least for now. If she wanted to talk about why (and how?) a ghost could hate her, she could, but - well, she didn't exactly seem the type to go around sharing her deepest darkest feelings with literal strangers off the street.

"The fu--" Blarney caught himself; as a rule, he and his sister didn't swear, but that was Madeline's rule that Blarney occasionally broke, but it still felt--well, that felt the least normal, out of the incredibly un-normal things that were happening all at once nowadays, so he corrected himself. "The storms. My friend--she said there was a snake that wanted to eat the world. The..." Blarney trailed off for a moment, searching his memory--he wanted to get it right, wanted to show her that in spite of being approximately an hour old, magically speaking, he wasn't completely hopeless.

"Calamitous Hollow, the Herald of the Dark Star," Blarney said, dropping his voice to a low murmur in case this was a Voldemort situation and saying its name woke it up. He didn't think so, since Halia had said it without apparent fear or trepidation beyond the whole world-eating thing, but--still. Better safe than sorry. "My friend told me that you guys--and the other side--trapped it back up again. Is anyone worried about the 'Dark Star' part of the equation? 'Cause a herald is a thing that like, announces the coming or presence of something, right? So like..." Blarney grimaced. "Does that mean the thing that really did a number on everybody, regardless of side, was just an appetizer for something worse than a world-eating snake?"

Blarney shook his head. "It has zero bells and no whistles, except it can like, do a ye olde instant message or something when I write something down for someone and push my ring into it."

I don't know and I don't think about it. It wasn't just 'I don't know', nor was it 'nobody knows', and still again it wasn't 'there's people who are looking into that'. I don't know and I don't think about it. The force of will behind a statement like that - the knowledge that it was there, but the abject refusal to acknowledge it, the negation being the action taken for it...

It made Blarney's heart hurt. He didn't know what it was like, but he was at least self-aware enough to know he didn't know enough to talk about it.

"I met a cat," Blarney said. "The night I awakened--or, I guess, I awakened because of the cat. A youma was chasing him. I just thought he was a normal cat that was gonna get eaten, and like--no cat deserved that, right? So I chased it down, grabbed a stick to try and have something to defend myself with, and next thing I know, I have a flowercrown and a whole new look. Then the cat starts talking." Blarney chuckled softly and shook his head, letting out a soft sigh as he looked up at the stars above them.

"Do you think winning is possible?" Blarney asked, voice soft. "For either 'side'. I don't even really know what exactly we're fighting, except that there's us, the good guys, and them, the bad guys, who want to eat souls and God knows what else, and we want...just, I guess, them not to do that? Do we even have like, a positive goal? An achievable goal, beyond something not happening? Never mind. My point is, they don't go around thinking 'hey, I'm a bad guy, I can't wait to do some evil today', probably, right? Like, in their head, they're probably the good guys too, and we're the bad guys standing in their way of what they want." Blarney sighed. He didn't know where he was going with this. "If this is like...a war...wars end, or at least they're supposed to. If we're all getting reborn all the time, but we don't even know it until we know it and don't really have a choice in the matter...how can either side ever say they've won, good game, everybody go home? Are there like--peace talks or something? A compromise everyone can live with that keeps everyone from dying all the time? From what my friend said--you guys were able to work together, to fight against the snake thing, right? If you can do it once, can't we do it again, without the threat of the entire world we live on getting eaten?"

The pang in Blarney's heart ached again, and he had to stop himself from reaching for her - she didn't seem like the hand-holdy type, even though Blarney himself was.

"You do have power," Blarney insisted, though his voice was still soft. "Not only in the--the fighting way. You're smart, you have experience, and you've answered all of my eight trillion three billion nine million zillion kafrillion questions without making me feel like an idiot or like I don't belong here. And that's not even getting into all the good those two or three lives might do because you saved them - the ripple effect of these things. I think--I think I disagree with you on that part, Miss Garde. I think...I think if we can, we are obligated to...to alleviate some of the worldsuck, when we can, right? If we see a neighbor's house burning down, we don't say that we're not obligated to help, we--we grab a bucket or a hose, right?" Blarney's eyes were anxious, nervous in spite of himself for expressing this opinion, which he knew was naive, born from only theoretical experience with the topic, not real-world lived time doing it, but--

Well, he'd chased after Logan, before he even knew it was a special magical cat, just because he saw a little thing being hunted by a bigger thing and thought he might have a way to stop something terrible from happening.

Madeline--who had a lot of feelings about community, politics, fairness and the law, and Blarney could almost recite her rants from memory at this point--would say that after the house was out, it was everyone's responsibility to determine what had caused the fire in the first place - and then put a stop to that, too. To find the root cause that made people's houses keep catching on fire. To go to town meetings, or run for office, or become an arson investigator - whatever it took to make people's houses stop burning down so much. That was how you did anything in an environment like this. If everyone just kept their head down and minded their own business, the world would be in ruin.

Well, more of a ruin than it already was, Blarney amended grimly.

Blarney sighed, went to run a hand through his hair and was stopped by the flower crown. He rolled his eyes and dropped his hand.

"You keep saying conscripted. If someone had told you--told you that you could save two, maybe three lives, just for starters. Three people that would die if not for you. That three families would lose three babies, or brothers, or parents, or lovers. If someone had told you there were monsters, both animal and person-shaped, in the world, ripping people's souls out of their backs...would you really have said no thank you? I'm not--please don't think I'm judging, Miss Garde, I just--I didn't awaken, right away. It's...it's one thing to go through life oblivious, right? This was just--my home, my city, with its crime rate and occasional bizarre weather. Then finding out? That there was this whole--this whole secret, special level of existence, of life, that I just--never knew about? Because I wasn't spec--" Blarney cut himself off, pursed his lips, looked away from her.

He sounded like a petulant child.

This was not how he wanted this conversation to go.

He paused for the space of three breaths, and when he spoke, his voice was not only level, but back to its usual pleasant, uncomplicated tone. He was used to faking it when he felt otherwise; he was glad he could still do it when he was all flower-crowned up.

"Sorry! Sorry about that, you literally did not ask." Blarney laughed, wondering if it sounded forced to her, or if she bought the easy smile he'd plastered on his face. "Anyway, I just--I don't think you should call yourself powerless, Miss Garde. That's all. It's not true. You seem pretty powerful to me, and probably those other people you saved, too."