Welcome to Gaia! ::

From the sound of it, knights were just environmental activists who were extremely disinterested in doing any kind of work. It didn't exactly describe Blarney, but maybe that boy was the odd one out. He looked young; maybe he hadn't been indoctrinated into Medieval PETA or whatever. He wasn't listening with much scrutiny; his attention was on that emanated from Hybris. A strange affair to feel someone without seeing them, or hearing them, but Hybris transitioned to that point in short order.

So it was normal to feel people. Like vibe-checking someone before interacting with them. He supposed that was useful; some people pissed him off by simply existing near him, so it would be helpful to be apprised of that before engaging.

"Suppose we'll get free food out of it if we promise to be less bad?" Eles asked as he looked out across the kept lawn. "Or are they stingy about it because they photosynthesize?"

"I think some would give us food. Big Bro...the senshi Murikabushi? He'd give us water or maybe take us out for milkshakes if we were looking especially cute and sad." And here came that aura, clean but abrasively so. But at least she didn't seem eager to fight.

Raising his hands, including the one that still held Faustite's, Hybris greet her with a friendly, "No, no don't worry, we've been very good tonight!" He gave her a reassuring smile but the edges of it were a bit tense. Honestly, he looked like he'd rather be running away right right now.

"We were actually looking for someone who could send a little message for us with their signet. Besides, I wouldn't ever be able to forget someone as majestic as you, Miss Knight."

She had been giving the darker haired twink a withering look when the bottle blond twink distracted her away from the harangue, forming on the tip of her tongue, about not trying to treat her like an idiot susceptible to bad flattery, when she was in fact a smart person susceptible to good flattery.

"Oh, sweetheart," she said, in a pitying tone. "You don't let me do anything."

She hesitated. She was not especially in the mood to be dispensing favors to members of Chaos. That mood, perhaps, did not exist to her at all. But it might be worth feeling out. It might be useful to have someone who owed her something. Even a couple of twinks, a category of human being that Joy broadly classed as generally useless.

And she was nosy, and if they were needing her services in order to contact an Order figure - which she stupidly assumed to be the case, idiot thoughts from a moment ago notwithstanding - she damn well wanted to know who it was, and why. This might be another Grieve situation.

"What kind of a message?" she asked, sounding more skeptical than cautious. "And to who?"

She vaguely considered asking them what polycule they belonged to. That seemed to be how things worked with those guys.

Rolling his eyes for her quip, Eles took his attention off of her as if she somehow bored him. Instead, he watched his boy, his free hand hanging idly at his side, while Hybris (smartly) kept the attention trained on him. After all, it was him requesting the favor. It was him who had the note. Even if it was Eles who disturbed Hybris and Albite's little outing together.

"He's really loud," Eles added helpfully, in reference to Albite.

But he wasn't taking his eyes off a cute boy to look at a decidedly not-cute girl. Even if she was dressed in a whole lot of dead things that she could be dispensing to them at a perfectly reasonable price. He even had some rolls of cash that weren't sweaty from being in the back pockets of mouthbreathing truckers.

Then again, helpfully, "I stabbed him in the face."

The look of pride that had Hybris couldn't quite help at Faustite's claim, visibly increased when tipped the knight's willingness over to their side. He did, however, resist the urge to make her endure some resulting PDA. Yes, his boy is so strong and so good at stabbing. Thank you, Miss Knight, for appreciating that.

Or maybe for just having a grudge against Albite.

She went on to start making her own cover letter, which was likely wise in creating for herself an additional degree of separation. The request to read it, though...

Tapping the folded paper to his lips he considered it, then finally answered, "I was going to say no, as it's personal, and a bit rude to ask. But you are doing us a favor, and considering who its for," he sighed. "Well, I'll consider it the limit of his discretion if he doesn't put it on a billboard and light that on fire, this time."

Because yes, Albite was loud.

Hybris handed over the paper, lightly scented with an overpriced cologne she likely recognized.

"It is rude," she agreed apologetically, resisting the urge to throttle the little twerp. "Forgive me. It's a self-preservation thing. You understand. He's loud."

She paused in her writing to, finally, approach near enough to take the letter. If she silently fired up her Aspect before doing so just in case she was about to get jumped, she kept that between herself and God, although there was a certain aura of saintly brightness to her when she reached out.

She ran her eyes over it briefly. The word fiance made her inwardly roll her eyes - did the Negaverse just have a great deal on wedding venues? what was with these people? - but she did little more than rapidly scan it to see if it was something she'd regret sending and, more to the purpose, to ascertain whether it contained any information she ought to be relaying to people she actually cared about.

It didn't seem to. She returned it with a bright little smile, but not before lifting it to her nose and commenting, with abstract approval: "Baccarat?"

She finished writing her own note, then, and folded it around Hybris's.



After a moment's thought, she dotted the i with a little heart, inwardly gagging as she did so, and then, after carefully spelling out Albite on the outside, she sealed it, having to use the immediate expedient of crushing a cherry - also from subspace - to do so in a pink, watery smear. She was going to need to start carrying ink or something, if everyone else couldn't get with the digital times.

The missive blinked out of existence, and she turned a bright, dimpled smile on Hybris, utterly insincerely, as she popped the remnants of the cherry into her mouth.

"I have your name now, I suppose. And you are-?"

She turned to the blond expectantly, but even as she asked it a series of memories flooded back to her, rapidly connecting themselves: Everything Albite had said, Blarney's messages, and the lines she'd just read, suggesting that Albite learn to let go of what he'd already lost.

Her smile did not falter. It was only that she had to turn to spit the pit away, frantically running her mental hands over the energy signatures in front of her as if she could turn the one over and shake it, dislodging the truth, while she inwardly raved against herself for not reading the ******** thing more carefully.

'Self-preservation' sounded more to Eles like she expected to get all the spoils, the information, the good gossip, without having to give anything but her little stamp to send that message on its way. It wasn't like she was offering her name. And she'd already gotten Hybris's by reading a letter that wasn't for her eyes at all.

And now that the letter was poofed out of existence, just like Blarney had done in front of him before, Eles would likely never get the chance to read that letter. He spared a nonplussed glance at his boy, which he then diverted to the knight who never offered her own name. Her manners were quite terrible — much worse than Blarneys, and probably worse than Murissa or whoever. Hybris's free food hookup.

"You don't need it, since you didn't give yours," he answered, smiling. "And I don't know it.

"But if you need a name so you can tell your friends about me, use Cadmium." It was all the same to him. Plus, it made for a delightful pigment that poisoned many an artist over the centuries. He'd get to be a part of history, if by name alone.