Welcome to Gaia! ::

Mason had no idea what sort of thing she may have found on Aruna - some sort of alien tech, maybe? All he'd found at Blarney so far was his ring, really, though admittedly that was a very cool thing to find. He made his way up to Halia's apartment and knocked twice before he let himself in, but stopped short as he took in the state of the place.

“What…uh, what's going on, Hals?”

Mason blinked and shut the door behind him, then joined her on the couch. “Oh. Uh. Okay.” That seemed like a lot of change, but it also didn't seem like she wanted to talk about it, so Mason just said, “Tell me when you're gonna move all this stuff. I can help cart it over and into your new place. We have the McMinivan for a reason,” he added with a grin, then shook his head.

“Anyway, whatcha wanna show me? Some cool Arunan artifact?”

“Woah,” Mason breathed, eyes going wide as he looked from her to the relatively unassuming little necklace she was holding out to him. “That's…incredible. I'd love to see it, if you're sure you want to…yknow, revisit it?” Mason glanced back at her, eyebrows knitting together slightly in concern. “If you show me how to get it set up I can watch it in another room if it'll be upsetting for you to see it all over again.”

Mason was not a boy who was often silent. Sometimes he even talked in his sleep.

But now, watching this - he was dead silent, his eyes glued to the holographic images dancing in front of him. He wished Halia didn’t have to be such an active participant in this part of the process; it couldn’t be helping whatever PTSD she was clearly suffering from this battle to re-watch it again, live in living color.

However big the creature he’d been imagining when people said ‘world-eating snake’...he’d been wrong. By like a factor of a bazillion. His own stomach rolled over, just watching it through Halia’s eyes, but what was even worse was…

“Who is that?” Mason finally asked, eyes glued to the woman who was clearly from the Negaverse; from what he could tell, she might as well be the Negaverse, as a whole, for what she was able to call down and the effect it clearly had on every Order-aligned person on the battlefield. Muri called her Queen Becky, but somehow he didn’t think that could be her actual name.

(Would be very funny if it was, though.)

“What did she–what was that,” Mason wondered, even as the scene before him changed - something later, back to fighting the snake. No, it wasn’t a snake. It was a dragon, like, Game of Thrones-has-nothing-on-this-thing dragon. It was shrinking as they fought, and he watched in sick fascination as he, by way of Halia, watched people from all sides fight and fight and fall before the creature.

It was a miracle that they had won. It shouldn’t have been possible, Mason thought vaguely, through the numbness that was starting to creep up his extremities. What had he been doing, while all this was going on? He didn’t know the exact date on which the battle had transpired, but he hadn’t awakened yet.

So, like, while Halia and all the others, every magical person in Destiny City probably, had been out fighting for their lives and the lives of every person, animal, plant and idea to ever exist on planet Earth, he’d been…what, like, in English class?

Mason suddenly felt very, very small.

“Thank you,” he said, as the memories came to a stop and the hologram faded away. “For showing me that.” Mason hesitated a moment, then reached out and caught her free hand in one of his, giving it a gentle squeeze - a reassurance, an expression of gratitude. He got it, a little bit - she was terrified, all the time, and this was why. She was - like that with him because she was so worried he was going to stumble upon the next world-eating snake and try to take it on alone and get himself eaten or worse in the process.

Frankly, Mason was amazed she - and everyone else there - had the strength to get out of bed, after what they’d been through. For maybe the first time, he understood why they called this a war.

Insignificant. Yeah, he was familiar with the feeling, and the crushing discomfort, anguish, helpless rage - it was what he butted up against every time she, or anyone else, reminded him about his lack of magical powers. What he'd felt watching those memories - he couldn't imagine how small everyone there felt in comparison to that thing that had descended from the heavens like a tsunami. He had felt small just watching the instant replay. And he couldn't deny that if he'd come up against the dragon-monster, his little stick wouldn't have done much good - he would've been dragon dinner.

“Look,” Mason said, voice soft. “I get it. I really do. I promise - now, I really do get it. But…it's not like you run into space-snakes every other day. There was plenty of warning before that went down - not like it was a sneak attack or a surprise, right? There was a plan, people were organized…or at least as organized as Order can get. It's not - it would be wild even by our standards if another space snake, or something like it, popped up again, at least before I do finally get some magic. I'm not going to get snaked. That I can pretty much promise.” Mason squeezed her hand gently.

“As far as getting starweeded goes,” he said, using the incorrect term now to try and make her smile, “I'll never make friends of my own if I don't put myself out there. I'm not saying Albite and I are going to like go halfsies on a ski trip to Vale or something, but - I think his name might carry some weight with the bad guys. Maybe at least enough to give me a chance to book it if things go south.” Mason hesitated, then let out a soft sigh. “I get it, Hals, I really do, but…I'm never gonna get magic if I stay home and play computer games all day. I have to - like, I have to have experiences and screw up and do well and everything else, right? I don't think magic gives you more magic on the basis of who can avoid stuff the best. If you want me to get stronger, be able to stand on my own, then you gotta…y'know, let me get stronger. Let me do that. This thing we're all doing isn't exactly safe, but…I've survived this long, haven't I? Killed some youma, even. Don't you think I've earned a little bit of credit on the keeping myself alive front?"

“Of course I know how to fight,” Mason huffed, as if he hadn’t only picked up the self-defense classes after he awoke in the first place. “And I’m a cheerleader. I’m fast and strong and my high kicks do not mess around,” he added with an impish grin. “I’m taking classes downtown and everything. And I bought my own punching bag! If you wanna train with me, I’d love that, but Hals, I promise, I’m taking this seriously, and at a certain point, you’re just gonna have to trust that I don’t want me to get hurt either, right?” Mason smiled kindly, gently. “I get being worried, I really do, but I don’t want me and my growing pains keeping you up nights. I’m okay now and I’ll be okay later and eventually I’ll get some magic stuff to do and I’ll be extra fine then.”

Mason paused, circling back in his mind to something she’d said at the beginning - about there being more of them.

“Why does the moon have a palace, and why did you guys have to break in? Couldn’t you just knock?”

Mason frowned, his interest peaked. This was the first he’d heard of any Queen of anything on the good guy’s side, and it intrigued him. Maybe there was something there, something he could use as he tried to create some order for Order.

There is no price which can be paid in hubris, the tiny memory of what was apparently a ghost-hologram-recording-thingy said. It struck a deep chord in Mason, and almost without thinking he pulled his little notebook and Madeline’s sparkly purple pen from his pocket and began to take notes, though his eyes never left the memory recording.

There is a power in you that will grow when you share it with others. This, too, fed the hunger in him in a way that made him crave more - he knew trying to get everyone on the same page was the right thing to do. He knew it, and so did the moon lady.

The Surrounding was built because so many came together to do so. What the heck was a Surrounding? It was something buildable, apparently, which also meant it was something breakable, and as Mason listened, he pieced together that it had, in fact, broken, or at least…started to. He thought of Blarney Castle, and his heart ached. Maybe a lot of things had been whole once and weren’t anymore. If you can manage it, invest in long distance surveillance. Create a network to monitor what you can.

“Long-distance surveillance,” Mason repeated aloud, eyes widening slightly at the idea. Maybe he’d been thinking too small-scale, he realized. He’d been thinking about the city, if there was a way to tell when someone powered up for the first time, to ensure that there could be a welcome wagon of sorts, someone always ready to jump in and help a newly-awoken Senshi or Knight. But that was too small, or maybe too big; he had no idea what sort of magic or technology it might take to turn their little internal radars that said who someone was - bad guy, good guy, weak, strong - and externalize it.

But what he did know existed was satellites. A lot of them. Telescopes. NASA was always sending robots into space and having them report back, weren’t they? And they didn’t even have magic about it! They didn’t even have–

“Wait, oh my god,” Mason said, actually standing up with excitement as he began to pace around the room. “The–we can go to planets! Not–not me, not Earth Knights, we’re here in our pocket dimensions, but oh my God, Halia! Halia. Hals. Listen–listen,” he said, nearly tripping over himself in his hurry to get his words out.

“What if–what if the Mauvians could make a–a beeper. A motion detector. A little guy that could be sent up into the atmosphere of everybody’s planets or moons or meteors or whatever, specifically rigged to only trip when something Big and Bad wanders by? How–like, how far away from Earth is Aruna, in miles? If something bad goes by Aruna on its way here, think about how much extra notice we’d have! Or like, if something tries to eat Pluto before it eats Neptune, right? That’s–we gotta–I gotta talk to Viatrix–”

He went back to furiously scribbling in his little notebook as he walked, pacing around the half-packed boxes. Long-distance surveillance! Of course they couldn’t think about that at the time, not with the snake-dragon bearing down on them at any second, but now it was dealt with and they were still around and oh by the way there are more Harolds of the Dark Star, which–Mason didn’t like the sound of that, as stars in his mind were not usually dark. They were, in fact, usually quite bright, given his understanding of what a star was (on fire). The only ‘dark’ thing he could think of in space was–

“A black hole,” he said aloud, stopping to stare up at Halia again. “The–did you know that like, all those sci-fi movies where someone goes through a black hole and pops out somewhere else–those aren’t actually possible because you can never reach–it’s–okay Madeline made me watch this documentary,” he said, doing his best to start over from the beginning, because Halia was not his sister which meant she could not automatically follow his ping-pong of a thought-trail.

“About space. About black holes. Black holes have what’s called an ‘event horizon’, which is basically like - the end of the black hole. Nobody knows what happens on the other side of an event horizon like that, because when you get into a black hole, basically time and space get all warped and you turn into like, a spaghetti noodle. Everything gets stretched out and awful and eaten. You physically can’t get to the other side of a black hole, or maybe there is no other side of a black hole - because time stops so movement stops. But it like, eats light and time and all the other measurable things that make up the universe,” he said, prattling off facts from a documentary he’d seen once, over two years prior, because there was just no accounting for what would permanently take hold in his brain and what would fall out of it like water in a strainer. “What if–what if we could make--I mean, not literally, but like–what if we could take that concept and make a black hole? To send all the other Harolds into? Stuck forever, can’t eat something that eats you, wham bam, spaghetti space monster!”

It was at about this point that Mason realized he sounded absolutely insane.

He deflated slightly. Just slightly.

“I mean, not you and me do it. Probably not most of us do it. But there’s gotta be some kinda magic or magic technology or technology that someone has access to that could do something like that, right? What we’d do after, or how we’d keep the black hole from eating all of us, I don’t know, but…” Mason trailed off and let out a sigh, reluctantly returning back to the couch, to the memory. A long-distance surveillance system. A network to monitor what you can. A network.

“It could be like–like the beacons of Gondor,” Mason said, returning to his original thought as he, sadly, set aside the idea of a spaghetti space monster. “Like when the farthest-out person’s world’s radar goes ping, then the next one goes ping, and so on and so forth, till everything’s going ping and we can see where they come from, and maybe figure out where they’re going to go next. We could take the fight to them, maybe, or at least–know who needs help sooner, right?”

Mason scribbled a few more notes in his notebook, then looked back at the memory as he waited for the woman to speak again. There may be files here. I do not know where, I do not know under how much security. I do not know if they have been deleted or stolen. You may find them here. Do not stop looking.

“Has anyone been back to the moon since this?” Mason asked. “Or, I guess Moon Knights probably have, but…” he paused, to scribble in his notebook again: Howick - explore moon palace? “Has anyone looked for this stuff since the spacesnake was handled?”

Mason looked back at the memory, focusing on what seemed like the last thing the ghost-hologram-Queen lady said.

Trust in me. I will not abandon you.

And Halia had said that she did help them. She had made good on her word, which was pretty impressive for a ghost-hologram. There was some great force on their side, too, Mason realized slowly. Sure, she was dead or something, but–what was it she had said? My will persists, or something.

Maybe that was all they needed. The will of someone impossibly powerful and impossibly old, who wanted to help them, who wanted to fight the Chaos that was hurting everyone. Maybe the people who had been around for a long time took it for granted, or wanted more and were disappointed in what she was or what she could do, or felt like she should’ve done more (again, she was dead, so like, maybe they needed to adjust their expectations) over the years to stop the death that they’d been wading through all this time. He could understand that, the resentment that might build up - absence of a thing created a wound all its own, he knew that for a fact.

But Mason didn’t resent her. She’d helped keep all his friends alive against the spacesnake. She knew a lot, and wanted them to succeed. That, for Mason, was a sign that organization–their numbers, like she’d said–was possible, and something to strive for. If there was a Queen, maybe there could be…a President, or something, of magical people. Everyone could get a vote, maybe…or maybe there could be representatives from each faction…

Mason, having already forgotten that he asked Halia anything, was scribbling in his notebook again, utterly absorbed.

“Valencians,” Mason echoed, writing this word down in his notebook. He was going to need to get another one of these if this kept up - taking notes was Mads’ thing, not his, and his hand was starting to cramp. He shook his hand out, flexing the muscles as he spoke. “Are those the guys–in the first memory, the fight, the shield thing?” He hadn’t been able to see much of that, Halia had been understandably preoccupied with her area of the battle and the people she was nearest too, but he had seen - someone doing something, and then he’d seen a shield happen, big and strong enough for scales to bounce off. If they could do that, and under those conditions…

Mason underlined the word, then put a little arrow next to it with the word Mr. V? next to that - he needed someone specific to reach out to, he couldn’t just go shouting into the void that he needed to talk to aliens. Besides, apparently in this city, that wasn’t even specific enough!

“Viatrix is Encke’s cat,” Mason said, shaking himself out of his circular thought path. “I talked to her the other day, she’s awesome.” That also meant that, however unintentionally on Viatrix’s part, he now knew both Encke and Basiluzzo’s civilian identities, sort of, because he knew Aruna’s. It made sense that magical people sort of clumped together, whether by marriage or by blood, but it also made everything so much more - complicated. Scary.

But Encke’s was a name that kept popping up. First from Albite - who’d said he was involved in the kidnapping - and then from Halia in passing, and then from Halle, who’d said Encke had offered something about a safehouse, which Halle had refrained from actually writing down, so Mason followed suit and did not commit that to paper. He didn’t commit anything about Encke to paper, actually, except the letter E with a questionmark next to it. He needed to meet this guy for himself, see if he was the good kind of good guy or the kind of good guy who was…not good.

But nobody bonded to someone as delightful as Viatrix could be not-good, right?

Mason rubbed his forehead and turned away from that mental pathway too - there was so much to think about, he felt like his head was going to explode.

“I’d like to meet Basiluzzo,” he said with a little smile. “And all your people. I just–don’t want to embarrass myself,” he said, his smile turning a little sheepish. “I know I’m–a lot sometimes. I should probably find some chill before that happens, huh?” Mason chuckled and shook his head at himself.

“I know one Moon Knight,” he said. “She was really cool. We sparred a little, I’ve been meaning to reach back out to her to say hey. I wonder if she was at the…” he gestured to the locket, meaning the memory. “We’re not like bestest buddies or anything, but I bet she’d talk to me about it, maybe I could convince her to poke around the moon the next time she pops over to her Wonder…if it works like that, anyway.”

In his notebook, he scribbled: other wonders like blarney? pocket dimension or on real planet/etc?

“You’re right about Aruna,” he said, scribbling a note about that down: languages = information. “People’s deaths can tell you a lot about people’s lives, probably. That’s a really, really good idea, I think.” Mason gave her a big smile. “I think–maybe look for other stuff, too. What did that lady say - that the Hollow was the most, sorta, like, well-knwon or whatever, but there were others? I bet they’re not all giant snakes. I–I don’t know if I–I don’t know if I want to go into the whole…Dark Star part, at least right now, not only ‘cause it scares the pants off me as a concept after seeing that fight with the snake, but ‘cause, like…we need to prep for the next big fight, sure, but like, we gotta lay the groundwork first, right? Like, we need–we need to get back to basics and make sure everybody’s on the same page.” Mason paused, then laughed. “Page. I’m a–never mind. Terrible pun, totally not on purpose but it should’ve been. I–me and another Knight I met, we’re trying to like…give some infrastructure to this whole thing that we do. You’ll help with that, right? I–I don’t know what we might need, but–it’ll only work if Senshi and Knights and everybody are all in lock-step alignment, I think, or as much as we can be, what with how different all our powers are and how we might all feel about all this stuff. Y’know what I mean? But–you’ll help, right? Please? Pretty please?”

“I knew you’d say that,” Mason beamed, “to the point where I almost forgot to even properly ask you.” Mason laughed and shook his head, looking back at his notes. “Thank you. Really. For showing me all this. It’s–it’ll make everything…well, maybe not easier, but…it’s information. Resources. It’s–I don’t feel quite so much like I’m floundering around in the nothingness,” Mason chuckled and looked back at her, a smile on his face.

“You’re the best, y’know that?”