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Blarney let out a breath, puffing his cheeks out like a pufferfish until the breath ended. It was fine, it would be fine, everything will be fine: this is what he had been repeating to himself ever since he and Valhalla had settled on the time and date that they would be going to the moon.

Going to the whole entire moon.

To meet the source of his magic.

Behind his nerves, Blarney had been spending a lot of time - a lot of time - trying to develop questions that he had; things that he didn't think the other Senshi or Knights he ran into would have the answers for. The Code might not technically be god, or God-with-a-capital-G, but he was pretty sure that The Code was, at least, in possession of god-like magic and power, and hopefully knowledge. Maybe it couldn't see the future - but what if it could?

Blarney let out another low and slow breath. This was fine. This would be fine. If nothing else, he was at least completing one of the assignments from Halle's to-do list:



He had more questions - but for Valhalla. They were multitudinous and disorganized, and they changed every other minute, it felt like, but mostly it was the point on the to-do list that Blarney was concerning himself with: find out their stories. Their biggest fights, biggest wins. Not just Valhalla's, but his family, if they had been as involved for as long as it seemed, they were bound to have some good ones. Or bad ones. Whatever ones he had - Blarney would take anything Valhalla had.

"What, like I'd miss out on the no-rocket-required moon launch?" Blarney asked with a chuckle, shaking his head slightly. He listened to the how-to, nodding as Valhalla spoke. You just need to need it. That shouldn't be a problem, Blarney thought, given that he was going out of his skin with need 98% of the time and barely covering it up the other 2%. It was just a matter of giving into it, he mused. Should not be a problem.

Blarney took Valhalla's hand, the gesture surprisingly intimate in a way that made him feel very small - like a kid holding a teacher's hand to cross a busy street. That wasn't not what they were doing, Blarney decided; he just hoped they wouldn't get hit by any space-cabs on the way.

"It actually doesn't sound ridiculous at all," Blarney reassured him. "At least, no more ridiculous than..." he looked down at his outfit, then looked around them pointedly, "anything else I've heard in the last couple months." He chuckled, then straightened his shoulders. You just need to need it.

He thought of the questions, carefully honed. He thought of all the conversations he'd had - with Halle, with Halia, with Viatrix and with Joy. With Valhalla, with Bifrost. With his own sister, even.

He thought about how many answers to his questions were 'I don't know', or 'That's not possible yet because', or 'Because if we don't we or others will die'. He thought about the exhaustion under Valhalla's eyes; he thought about Halle's voice when he'd said that most of the people on that first Senshi document weren't around anymore, for one reason or another, grimmer reason. He thought about Joy's anger at being 'conscripted'. He thought about the helpless, hapless confusion, the creeping anxiety that lay just beneath all of his demands to do better.

God, he needed help. He needed help. They all did, but Blarney - Mason - he was just...

He was just a kid.

Please, Blarney found himself thinking. Please. Please help me, so I can help everyone else. Please.

After a moment of reticence, Blarney allowed himself to mentally face it: the anxiety, the need, the overwhelm, the--

The fear.

He needed help, because every minute he didn't get it, he was basically begging to be killed. It was so, so scary - with or without magic. Even if he'd never awoken, there were monsters who wanted to eat him. He was so small, he was just one person, and he needed to gather people together, people who knew more, people who were more powerful, smarter, better-equipped. But who would believe him? Who would follow him anywhere? He didn't know anything. He didn't know anything.

What if nobody knew anything?

It yawned out before him, in his heart, in his mind, late at night when he couldn't sleep, and in that exact moment: what if nobody knew anything? What if there were no leaders, no followers, no nothing, and they were all alive and fighting the darkness for no reason at all, alone in an uncaring universe filled with monsters that wanted to eat them just because they were hungry and humanity was there?

Help, Blarney thought, desperation in his own mental voice. Please. Please. Please. Please help us. Please help me. Please.

Blarney peeked his eyes open, one at a time, letting out a slow breath as he looked around. He wasn't sure what he'd been expecting, but this somehow did, in fact, exactly meet his expectations of what something called 'the Moon Palace' should look like. It was much bigger in real life than the version he'd seen in Halia's memory, though, and Blarney felt weirdly like he'd gotten into the forbidden area of a museum; that he wasn't allowed to touch anything, lest it crumble away into dust.

And then Valhalla was speaking, casually, like you might to a coworker who'd been on vacation for a while and needed to catch up with. Blarney's eyes followed Valhalla's gesture and voice, eyes widening slightly as he took in what was, he thought, The Code. That was the source of all their magic. It was both less than and much more than he'd been expecting.

Blarney hesitated, glancing around the massive, tomb-like room for a moment; there were other things to investigate, he thought, his eyes landing on a console in a far corner looked like it had buttons to push, or a screen, or something - any time he and Mads went to a museum, he was always the one pushing the buttons. Over and over again, sometimes.

But what really kept dragging his attention was the very, very, very bright light, hanging down from the ceiling. It wasn't the sort of light you could get at Home Depot, that was for sure, and the longer he looked at it, the calmer he felt. And the blinder, but mostly the calmer - the warmer, the happier.

Oh.

"The Cauldron," Blarney said aloud, the surprise itself spurring him to speak. "That's--oh. Okay."

He'd been expecting something more...cauldron-y. Witch-y. Bubble bubble toil and trouble-y. That was where souls went, came from. Starseeds. It was so...

"Beautiful," Blarney murmured. He stayed quiet and still for another moment - both unusual for him, the gravitas of this place pressing down on him like a weight - and then pulled his gaze from the Cauldron to the pulsating source of his very own magic.

"Hi," Blarney said, quickly stepping over to join Valhalla, waving a little greeting to the glowing mist. He had no idea if or how it could 'see' him, but like Valhalla said, politeness was especially important.

So he straightened up a little as he came to a stop next to Valhalla, swallowed, and continued to speak.

"I'm Blarney, Knight of Earth. I--I guess you know that already, since I guess you...picked me, or...blessed me, or...well, made this happen. Thank you," he said, then repeated, more seriously: "Thank you. Thank you for letting me help people and showing me there's...there's so much more out there than I ever could have possibly dreamed up in a million years." Not all of it was good, but the bad stuff was harder to remember, up here. Was this what heaven was like?

"I...I've been trying really hard to learn as much as I can," Blarney began, resisting the urge to fidget as he spoke, "and be the best Knight I can be. But--I have some questions, and--and I guess I'd just really like to know--I guess, where to put my energy, to do the most good for the most people, y'know? Plus, the more information I have, the more I can share it with other people who might also be confused or upset or lost, and I think that--that could be really good. Maybe." Blarney swallowed. Be cool, be cool, be cool...

"Is--is it okay if I ask you some questions?" Blarney paused, then whispered to Valhalla, "Is there like an honorific I should use? Your Holiness? Your Glowiness? Mister or Miss The Code?"

Oh, boy. Blarney had the sudden disorienting sensation of being stuck in a dream - or a nightmare. The kind where you showed up naked to a final exam for a class you'd never gone to. 'Tell me what you have learned'. He'd learned so much, and what if all of it was wrong? What if he'd done such a bad job that he was sent back to like...

Blarney blinked. The Code had given him his abilities.

Could The Code take them away?

Don't borrow trouble, he thought to himself, though it was Madeline's voice. Instead of giving into the freefall of panic that threatened to rise up within him, he straightened, swallowed, took a deep breath, and nodded.

"That wasn't really the question, that was more - the heading of the questions," he clarified, "but I apologize for not being more clear. Right now, the good I want to do is focused mostly on increasing the strength of the foundation upon which Knights and Senshi come into their abilities. For Knights it can be especially--overwhelming, and confusing. I got--I mean, I guess I don't know if it's lucky, exactly, but...I got attacked by a youma before I awoke, and a Senshi saved me. She explained about, y'know, some of all of this, before I awoke. So I already kind of had an idea about all of this existing, before I came into my abilities. And then when I did awaken, I happened to be with a Mauvian, who was able to help me out a little more, in that moment and in the future, such as with upgrading my ring, which I didn't even know was a thing I needed to do until--anyway. Sorry. I apologize for--for rambling," he said, suddenly self-conscious.

"I don't mean--to sound ungrateful, Code, or whiny, or--or anything like that, I promise. I just--I think part of the reason the Negaverse works so well at their bad guy stuff is because--they're organized. We're not. And I get--I get it that part of the good guy's side is--is freedom, right? Like, nobody forcing anybody to do anything, but...shouldn't we still have the infrastructure so people can do things if they want to?"

Blarney sighed softly and started to run his hand through his hair, but remembered the flowercrown and dropped his hand. "To answer your second question - I'm good at people. People like me, most of the time, and I usually like most people. I--I care about people, and I believe the best in them, even when it's hard. And I know sooner or later that'll probably bite me in the butt, but...I'd rather get bitten than miss out on a chance at a friend, or the chance to help someone make their lives or the world a better place to be. I'm okay with putting my heart out there, because hardly anybody else does that, and--and everybody needs more of that. Magic or not. It's--anyway. That's...I think that's what I'm good at. People. Seeing people. Seeing who they are and what they could be, what they want, sometimes why they want it. I'm pretty good at compromise, 'cause of my sister, y'know - twins, and all. I--I think I bring a good attitude to the stuff I do, and I think that--I know I'm young, I know I'm new, but--I think I want to help people like Mr. V here remember--remember why they got into this in the first place." Blarney paused, a sheepish glance in Valhalla's direction. "Which kinda takes me to my next point, which is that - like, I'm young, right? A bunch of us are just kids, but a bunch of us are just kids. We don't have kids of our own, or families to worry about, or, like, jobs. We can do more with some of this stuff than Mr. V and his family and his people can, but we don't know how, or don't know what to do, and it all comes down to like, sheer luck or bad experiences to show us what we're supposed to do. And that's--that's just a waste. Because there's so many of us, we could be doing so much more if there was a safe way for all of us to meet up and talk and figure out a baseline and figure out how to reach out to new people, make sure they don't have to come up to the moon and get the basics from, no offense, a semi-transparent puff of sorta-deity." Blarney let out a faint huff, then closed his eyes and shook his head.

"I can tell you everything I've learned since awakening, but that might take a while, because I feel like I've learned a lot, but it hasn't been--like, I had to go and really try, really hard, to find people to teach me what I know. And I know some of what I was told initially was just flat wrong. I had to ask a million and one questions, and it took this long for someone to be like, 'hey, did you know you can go to the moon and ask these questions directly?', which is--it's just not--" Blarney bit down on the word that threatened to come out, the word that would make him sound every bit as childish as he was determined not to sound:

Fair. It wasn't fair that they were all scrambling in the dark like this. Senshis got cats, the bad guys got an onboarding document. What did Knights get? They didn't even get a real weapon, no magic...

It just wasn't fair.

"It's not practical," he decided instead. "And we could do a lot more good--however you define that--if you, or someone, or something gave us some more guidance on what we, collectively, should be doing to keep the world and all of us safe." Blarney sighed again. "Do you still want to know my specific questions? Because I thought a lot about it and do have some pretty detailed things I'd like to know, but--but I feel like you--like maybe you might wanna--I don't want to be in trouble," he admitted, all in a rush, immediately embarrassed. "And I do want to ask my specific questions, but--but that was a lot, and I'm sorry, and--and, yeah."