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Every time Joy, while out and about and testing her "get your stink on it" theory of Destiny City defense, detected on the air the aura of someone small and new, she found herself in the clutches of a struggle against herself.

Unfortunately, she always won. She was, after all, a person who took pride in always winning, even - no, especially - against herself.

Worse, this had been a somewhat active round, even if things had cooled considerably over the last couple of hours, leaving her with peaceful sidewalks still dotted here and there with the sad and moldering remains of Halloween pumpkins half-eaten by especially daring raccoons. It was the nice weather, she thought - tempting out a few lazy elements to stretch their legs in the worst way possible.

But tempting her own elements out, as well, and therefore obligated to keep an eye on one another. She made a face inwardly and straightened her back as she approached the little signature, ready to be either a patiently informative mentor or the "******** this" voice of sympathy that Ekstrom had, in a less enthusiastic degree, been for her, with her whip tucked into her belt. She was not happy about the fact that Hellawes was persistently following her around, but had eventually succumbed to humoring the enormous white bird enough to let her perch on her arm, which was getting tired from the burden but at least kept her from having to chase a falcon through alleys to keep it from murdering a possum and bringing the carcass back to her like an awful trophy. In her secret, inmost heart of hearts she was starting to become fond of how much more impressive she looked - quite royal, really - with an expensive-looking falcon on her arm.

Enough digital ink has been spilled on observing that she looked like a cross between a seventies fantasy novel cover and a Pre-Raphaelite queen bestowing a favor on her presumably-doomed lover, so let it instead be said that tonight she was especially fresh-faced and rosy in the temperate air - a queen of Earth, no doubt, and all the things that might entail in terms of liveliness and changeable, dangerous disposition, for all that she was no queen at all - and that, as usual, the greeting she sang out immediately undercut the impression both by being accompanied by a very slight Kentuckian drawl and being laden with cheerful vulgarity.

"Don't say it's a quiet ******** night," she called out, once she was within earshot. "It always jinxes s**t."

Which put her almost eye-level with Joy, who stood a scant inch taller.

Obsessed with was somewhat disconcerting. In fairness, Joy felt that this was the sort of mindset most people ought to have when it came to her, but applied to Blarney it felt very strange. It was almost offensive, as if she had failed somehow in impressing him with being prickly and aloof.

"Maybe a little," she said drily. She did not say that he clearly had not exaggerated the gorgeous part. It would not have been polite. It also, to her mind, did not need saying.

She hesitated, instead, wondering whether to gloss this over. It felt uncomfortably close to that sort of real-life-ferreting-out that Joy prided herself on avoiding, and equally cherished others avoiding with her. But she went ahead, figuring that of all people Blarney was one of the least likely to get hung up on the formality.

"I didn't realize that his sister was in this as well," she said. "Although I'll be honest, it's possible he told me and it got swallowed up in the torrent somewhere," she added, again with a touch of dryness. She was eyeing the stranger right back, with a critical, appraising glance. Not an Earth Knight, which seemed somehow odd - a twin, surely, she would have thought, would have shared this - but also irrelevant. Joy had no sense of fraternity or fealty to the symbol or its supposed indications.

She decided, after a pause, to be professional. It was generally a good fallback. She extended her hand - the palm glowing the color of pale sunlight - and continued: "So you know my name already, or at least the title I'm obligated to use right now. And yours is -?"

An expression of longsuffering came slowly across Joy's face. She gave her arm a little bounce, sending the bird flying away, and then shook out her hand as if attempting to dislodge, with the movement, some other unrelated annoyance.

"He is certainly enthusiastic," she said, which was enough, in her estimation, to say volumes. She thought, then, of Grieve. "There's probably worse people he could be getting advice from." She thought of Grieve again. "Probably better people too," she conceded. "Anyway, I imagine it will be useful for both of you to have someone else at -" she paused, having been about to say "at your hip," before deciding this was perhaps some sort of anti-twin microaggression, "- your side. But taking anything anyone says as gospel is going to get him into ******** trouble one day," she finished bluntly, "even if the anyone is me. Don't do that."

The words "you're like them" had kindled a flare of rage in her so intense that it blindsided even herself, and it took until the end of Edam's speaking - and a few long seconds afterwards - for her to wrangle it under control again.

"If he told you that I was going to give you that kind of speech then he lied even more than he did about the height," she said testily. "******** destiny. ******** Destiny City half the time, even," she added. "******** fate and conscription and all that bullshit. I'll tell you something right now: you don't wanna do this, then don't. I sure as hell won't judge you for it and I've got some choice words for anyone who does, up to and including your brother."

This all came out, not with the heat of passion, with a sort of cold acidity, as if anger had only wrapped her up in ice.

"There's upsides," she said, hating herself even as she did. "But they're pretty ******** small in the grand scheme of things. I'm choosing to make the most of them, but you don't have to. You've been drafted. I've never had much heart for judging a drafted soldier choosing not to risk his neck. If you're not interested, then turn your back on it. I'm not daring you. I'm just telling you it's an option. If you get sucked in too deep because you feel obligated to serve on the side of good, you will reach a point of no return." She held up one glowing palm, now somewhat bitter. "Ask me how I ******** know."

She was quiet for a long moment, looking uncharacteristically exhausted. She did not even crack a grim joke that the costume was a definite upside, even though clearly it was.

"I have said, sometimes," she answered at last, "that the Code knew what it was ******** doing when it singled me out, because it knew that I wasn't going to stand there with a weapon in my hand and not use it. They murder people - you know? - the other side. And treat them like cattle when they don't murder them. I do not take keenly to random people being viewed as livestock."

She made a helpless sort of gesture, a wave of her hand that meant nothing. "But that isn't an upside. It's just another obligation and I don't blame anyone who decides they didn't ask for it. It's what keeps me doing it, I think. But there's - I don't know. There's - it's nice to have a little kingdom, even if it's a dead one that's never going to have any real people in it - never more than one, anyway. It's nice to feel like a superhero - not in the heroic sense but in the super sense - and it's nice to - to - I have seen so many places you cannot even imagine existing, when you're out there. And I've met people -"

Which felt like the lead up to a rally, but wasn't. "But it's not worth it. None of it is worth it. It's just the best you can make of a s**t situation, and I've just always been someone who tries to make the best out of s**t situations. Do not," she said, with dire emphasis, "let this name overwrite your other one in your own head. It does not have to take precedence. You didn't ask for it," she repeated. "Your brother doesn't understand me because he thinks this is all a big fun exciting opportunity and he cannot wrap his head around the idea that I don't, and that I even think refusing to see it as a conscription is - well. I won't insult your brother to your face," she finished, somewhat aloof. "You're still kids, right? And girls always have to grow up faster."

She sighed, although it was mostly inwardly. She did not want to be a mentor. She did not want to distribute intelligence or advice or what passed for wisdom. It was tempting to say ask your brother, but not about this. This was a place where she could get a foothold in on rationality, because God knows she didn't trust Blarney to supply it in large quantities.

"I don't know, to be honest. It's some sort of - thing, power, presence. There's little bits of it all broken up, one on each Wonder. It's sapient - sort of - you can talk to it - but it's the one that plucks our souls out of the aether and knights us. And it's horse s**t. Everyone goes, oh, the Code wants what's best for you," she said, unmistakably bitter, "but I've never seen a reason to believe it. You have to deal with it, at some point - have to negotiate with it or whatever - but my advice is not to trust it. It can lie. I've seen it. It will lie, and it will tell you that it lies for your own good. I'm not sure what it does. I think it sort of - I think things might be worse if it didn't exist, I'm not sure - but I don't have to like the way it chooses to do business in the meantime." She paused, sounding very, very tired when she continued.

"It's better than the alternative, maybe, if the alternative is murder. Or worse. They can - and they do - walk around and yank the souls out of people. And they can do worse. They can reach right into your own soul and turn you to their side against your will. If it comes down to saving your own skin or a bystander's," she added sharply, "choose your own and don't be a hero. Better a dead civilian than them getting their hooks into another recruit, you know?"

If this was a little hypocritical of her - if she had, on multiple occasions, made the other choice without even thinking of it as a choice - now wasn't the time to say so. If her instincts drove her towards sacrificial heroism, no need to make that someone else's problem, if their own led them differently.

But she relaxed, a little, and her voice took on a faraway edge, still weary but more distant. "But most of the time, you're not going to see that. You're just going to see them treating those bystanders like cattle - making them a little sick to boost their own numbers to do God-knows-what. I think a lot of them get queasy when it comes down to anything worse. Just - don't forget that they can. It's the only thing separating us, I think, sometimes. To hold someone's entire future in your fingers like a piece of blown glass, and treat it like a little piece of garbage - they align themselves, at the minimum, with those who do that. Make of that what you will."

It took her a little longer to answer this one, walking in troubled silence.

"I don't know for sure," she said at last - a lot of contemplation to end up with no certainty. "But I'll tell you this - I met a guy recently, helped him out - who had gotten turned against his will over a decade ago, and whatever it was they convinced him to do right after that, he'd been hiding from them ever since and eaten up with his own guilt. He was avoiding them - staying out of it - and finally he decided that it wasn't enough, and he came over to us. So whatever it is that they do - it doesn't make you a bad person. It doesn't rob you of your conscience and make you a zombie. Maybe some of them can be... rescued, I guess, is the word. But if they're out there doing bad s**t - killing, corrupting, treating people like livestock - they're doing it of their own volition. Brainwashed, maybe, but I can't imagine a world in which I'd be brainwashed that way."

She did not say, because she did not know, that this was a dangerous way to think. But Joy had a sense of self that was not often seen in others - had certainly not been seen in the agent she rescued, or even in her own predecessor - which did not stop her from holding those others up to her own ideal in uncompromising judgment. It was dangerous to think: I am immune to mind games that might eventually lead me to becoming a person I would now despise. But where she stood, it seemed and felt very true.

She hesitated, again. "But that's why I don't just go in guns blazing," she said, sounding, again, exhausted. "If they're not doing anything - if they're just wandering around - I try to make them skedaddle just by virtue of being around. But I don't lift a hand to them unless I see that they're doing the s**t to warrant it, or they go first. For all I know they're working against it from the inside. I think some of them must be, or they'd run smoother than they already do. It would be better if we could bring them over. Do you know - oh, god." She wilted at having to recur to this old argument of hers. "I sometimes say that it's a big game of Ming Mang, if you've ever heard of that. We should be trying to convert pieces. But we're working uphill and I'm a shitty ******** evangelist, so I'm not the one doing it. So I save my energy for direct intervention against people who can't help themselves, and I'm ******** pissed, if I'm honest, that I feel compelled to do that much."

There was an unmistakable bitterness in her. She was too morally upright to make herself a bystander, but selfish enough to wish that she could, in fact, be a bystander and remain morally upright.

"And I'll tell you this. I have no idea how it works. I don't know how you do it. But if you do decide to jump into this - dedicate yourself, as much as you can, to your Wonder. Because that's the only surefire armor you'll ever get against ending up corrupted yourself." She held up her glowing palm. "I would tell you how, if I knew. But as far as I know, getting marked out like this by your Wonder is the only way to keep yourself away from that fate. If you jump in," she repeated, firmly, "don't ******** neglect that part, or you're a liability to everyone."