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For all that her Great Transformation (as she thought of it, with sardonic capital letters) had relied on her taking the name of the Joyous Guard for herself, she had rarely in her life felt less joyous.

This was even more true when she was Joy, and not Elaine. Still, the world kept turning despite her own desire that it would pause for a while, and so she dutifully - on a night without clients and without anything else to fill her time - assumed the mantle and the spurs, and indulged in exercising her theory that she could keep Chaos at bay by the simple expedient of making a place stink of Order on a regular enough basis.

She had been kept at it, however, by the dim perception of a small, quiet signature. It seemed strange to think that just nine months ago she herself might have felt that way to a stranger - had, in fact, felt that way to Ekstrom, which was almost impossible to comprehend now. A lot had changed since then, but a distressing amount of things had remained exactly the same. She had needed, then, to see someone who had gone through the wringer of powered life, and who could look at her and say honestly that she could make anything of it that she saw fit, even if that was nothing.

It was, possibly, not a great thing that she was drifting towards someone probably-newer than herself in hopes of potentially talking them away from this life. But it would be worse, maybe, for them to never talk to someone like her.

To Joy, even now, it would always be a shame for someone to miss out on talking to someone like her.

She kept her whip tucked into her belt as she walked, and swung around her finger a ring on a length of red ribbon in an idle fidget.

“Evening,” she called out, as soon as she thought she might be in earshot of who she could not see - although she was still quite a bad judge of that sort of thing. “Dark as s**t around here. You'd think they'd want some more street lights.”

She was, herself, a glimmering golden speck in the darkness, the sunlight glow of her palms illuminated as she twirled the ribbon around and around her finger.

She held up the palms of her hands, looking for all the world like a sarcastic take on a painting of a saint. All she lacked was a gilded dinner plate of a halo.

"Something like that," she said drily. "But I'm not going to be doing any detail work by the light of them any time soon. They make you feel like you're running faster than you are, though," she added, playfully giving a brief demonstration of her hands moving in a Naruto run, as if to demonstrate the effect they had as some sort of visual turbo button.

She continued walking - not running - and speaking, moving as if she was accustomed to people falling into step with her naturally. "Don't say it's a slow night because it'll jinx us, but has it been a slow night?"

"Mine was a ribbon," she said, with a grim sort of cheerfulness. "I heard of someone else who got a feather. But you're preaching to the choir. It's absolute bullshit. And then at some point - if you don't just wash your hands of the entire business, and I wouldn't blame you, by the way - at some point, you'll want a weapon that can actually do the kind of damage the other side can do, and you'll have to go humble yourself in front of a dumbass glowing football and ask for it, like it wasn't their ******** idea to put a weapon in your hands in the first place." Her voice dripped with contempt. "And then you can only do it for - oh - a half a minute or so, and it goes back to being useless."

She paused. "I think they were different, a long time ago, but even then - the guy who had this whip before me," and she paused to poke at it with her thumb "-mostly used it to get people to give him their sword, I think." And then: "Good to hear someone willing to call this out for the bullshit it is, early days. I like you."

She made a disgusted, exhausted sound, sticking out her tongue and wrinkling her nose.

"Urgh. I hate to say it - I genuinely do hate to say it, that's not a turn of phrase - but we legitimately are the good guys. Not because we're underdogs, but because the other side is running around treating human beings like livestock. They'll murder a bystander without a second thought - I've seen it twice." She said this calmly, as if witnessing a murder was the simplest thing in the world. "Or rather, almost did. I showed up. Right place, right time. Still pretty sure I just got lucky both times. Hard to feel like the bad guy in that situation, you know?"

She paused. "But that doesn't mean it's like - we're filled with glorious Purpose, or whatever. Being on the right side doesn't mean much when the other side is what it is, especially when the right side can't get its act together - or even recruit the willing." She wilted visibly as she said this, clearly tired. "So yeah. It's hard to just wash your hands of it even without a sister to watch over. But don't lose your life to it. It's not - you didn't ask for it. It's not fair to throw away your life just so other people can have theirs," she said, and although she said it without any visible emotion, the pang of it was sharp within her, her thoughts very far away with someone very different than themselves.

She could have hugged him in that moment, as someone who had never been able to use any of the terminology related to this life without a sense of reluctant embarrassment suffusing her.

“Don't be a hero,” she said after a long pause for thought. “You didn't ask for it. You'll wanna help people - that's good. Do that. But you can't help people if you're dead. If you need to run, run. No shame in it. And remember it's a numbers game.”

She paused. “I, myself, almost can't stomach being nice to those people when I know what they do. But some of them are conscripts like we are - they're reachable. So I have started saving my breath for them and my violence for the ones that are actively in the middle of needing it.” This was not the advice she would have given a few weeks ago. But Maus had shaken her up somewhat. “But don't get me wrong. I'm not fit to convert people. So I don't bother. Figure out what you're good at, and do that. And if that's saying ******** it to the entire thing, I don't blame you.”

She hesitated again. “Have you - have you been to your Wonder?”

She felt, as she sometimes did when other Knights discussed their Wonder in a cavalier sort of way (no pun intended), a little discomfort. Too often she was nervous that she had been thrust into a path that had been carved out for her and over which she had no control, to the point that even her own desires felt suspect. This had never been more true since Transcending, when even her frequent longing for the Garde - and everything there - had seemed as thought it might be the machinations of some other cosmic force with which she had nothing to do.

"Well," she decided, "wait until you're ready, then. But it'll be important, eventually - you won't be able to, to - sort of feel your way around until you've done that, I think, and learned whatever it is you need to learn there. And you'll want to dig up your signet ring. But I'm probably telling you things you already know," she said, with a vaguely apologetic tone that wasn't quite apologetic enough. "Your sister can tell you all that. I just -"

She hesitated.

"- If there's anyone there, you know - they might be a little squirrely. Be good to them, if you can. I think wasting away for a thousand years watching their homes fall apart does a number on their psyche, and I think they're more reachable than the other side is. Anyway," she finished, shaking off an air of sudden troubled gravity, "it'll be waiting for you when you're ready for it. It's good that you have your sister - good to have someone you can go through this with. It gets lonely as hell, otherwise, and the damnedest part is it's too dangerous to let it stop being entirely lonely."

She laughed then, as if he had said something very funny.

"Joyeuse Garde," she said. "And normally I'd tell you to just call me Joy, but it's very funny that you're Bamburgh. I wonder if we're supposed to duke it out, Highlander style, to determine which of us is the real one. But I'd win," she added comfortably. "So we can skip that part."

"Before I got - you know -" she gestured at her general magical-ness, "- I read a lot of Arthurian literature and history. And I still do, but it's weird knowing how out of time and space all that s**t actually was. Anyway - the Joyous Guard is a castle in there, and scholars like to argue over where it actually was, even though it wasn't real. I mean, it was real - obviously - but the one in the stories isn't. Anyway, one of the places they like to claim was the Joyous Guard was Bamburgh. So maybe we're related in some distant way," she finished cheerfully. "But I have to tell that it's not an especially popular position for the argument. Let me know if you uncover any evidence that Lancelot ever hung out there, though. I haven't found any on mine."