"First ever real squire. I fostered Luther for a bit while Fuyuie was on a year's tour abroad, but he barely needed anything from me. I don't know if you've met Luther actually - he's down south."

Sergia may well have met Luther (a very good fighter but from much further south) or Fuyuie (who is an ancient silverhair from two baronies over, only seen on the fighting field with a marshal's stick but still very good for technical advice).

"I've never wanted to have one who was a bad fit or who I couldn't give the time to."

"Oh, Fuyuie's cool, I don't think I've met Luther. So, what would my obligations be to you and vice versa? And how, hmmm, formal-and-pageantry would you want to be about it, I have some suspicions but it's good to get on the same page out loud." Sergia wanted lots of formal pageantry even before learning it was strategically important.

Oh those are two very big questions back to back. 

"Let's address those one at a time. At absolute minimum it's a teacher-student relationship within the realm of fighting. I will teach you the fighting arts, and I expect you to usually listen but it's fine if sometimes you want to try other techniques and other people's ideas. Good, even. If I tell you to do something in battle I expect you to do it immediately and you can question me about it later. I protect you. When and if you're ready to advance, I will advocate for you to the Crown."

Nicole holds the door open for someone inside the supermarket who is leaving, and gestures Sergia ahead of her. They are heading to the cleaning supplies aisle first, to grab trash bags and antiseptic wipes.

"You aren't the kind of person who needs me to demand much of you when it comes to honour. I will try to guide you on the path and let you know when I think you're falling below my standards, and I will trust you to listen and care because I think your own standards for yourself are just as high. If people are annoyed at you for something, they can tell me about it, and I will try and correct you if they're right and defend you if they're wrong."

She locates the various cleaning supplies she is looking for, grabs a pair of plastic gloves and starts heading to the snack aisle. 

"When I was a squire, I pitched in for camp chores a lot, and I made tea and patched clothes and embroidered garb for a decent fraction of the household. Raoulin mentored me in anything I wanted to learn, and if he didn't know how, he found someone. He says he's not got a musical bone in his body, but he sat and listened to me play every piece I ever learned on the rebec. He's the one who developed my French from the high school level I had before, to being able to do poetry in it. He also bought me armour, made sure I always had a place to be and that I was fed at every event, and so on. We can have a relationship more like that, and I'd prefer it, but I wouldn't say no if you just wanted the fighting part."

Nicole pauses a bit to let Sergia say things before she moves on to the topic of pageantry. 

"I'd like that too. At least the helping with chores and making sure I have things to do at events and generally spending time together parts. And if I decide I ought to learn some more art forms I'd love to have your advice on them, or referrals to people who can give it."

When she's not replacing her worn-out garb she mostly just spins and gives the yarn to weaver friends, because it's a nice mindless thing to do by the fire after a day of fighting and it makes the weavers happy and nothing accumulates in her dorm room. But maybe if she does more art she'll be better at fighting demons, in which case she will absolutely do more art.

"Fealty is always a two way contract. We should both get something out of it, but the things we put in are different. I and my household can offer you protection and teaching and always being welcome to eat at our table, for your service and loyalty. I'm not a contract lawyer, so I'm not inclined to try and spell out that I'll buy you a maximum of twenty chocolate bars per week and you'll do a maximum of two hours of patching socks per week or anything like that involving numbers, but if it's important to you we can try to figure it out? I know you want to study law."

Nicole picks out some jerky, because breakfast didn't contain quite enough protein for her taste, and a couple of cans of Arizona iced tea for the drive. "If you need anything, grab it, I've got you."

"Thanks," she says, grabbing a mint chocolate protein bar. "I don't think I need a ton of detail either? The point of detailed written law is to enable deals between strangers with no reason to trust each other, and I'd rather have a relationship built on personal trust. Service and loyalty for teaching and protection and being part of your household, and the understanding that you won't ask me to do anything my honor forbids, is enough for me to go on."

"Exactly. I think I can say things like, grab whatever you want from the grocery store, and you understand that I mean a protein bar and not, say, twenty lottery tickets and a bottle of champagne." Slight smile. 

Nicole swings by another aisle to grab some extra duck tape for some camp repairs. Then they go to the aisle that has herbs and spices.

"As for pageantry, I'm big on it and my household's big on it. For the ceremony we'll use one of my old red belts, and I'll take my knight's device off and put mine on it. We'll get you a second one for fighting that is less fancy and you don't have to worry about ruining it, and more if you need something like a cloth or ribbon one to match any particular outfit. You'll get a household tabard and belt favours and things like that. There'll be swearing on my sword. Day to day... there's squires in the household that call their knights sir and squires that don't, I'm not fussy about it but I don't want you giving me Your Grace."

Nicole has the sense that Sergia doesn't need to be told not to call her things like oy you asshole or sweetie or Nicky or other things that are inappropriate to call one's liege, and probably already knows that Nicole doesn't like using the Duchess title over the knightly one, but laying down the law regarding one title will probably reassure Sergia that she really does mean it about not minding either way on sir. 

"That all sounds pretty great." She's going to be part of a household! As an actual separate person who was specifically invited! Camping next to her parents with her mom's very chill choral group because she's been there since she was a fetus doesn't count. "I expect I will end up calling you sir."

"Great. I'm glad we're on the same page." 

Nicole would probably have been vaguely uncomfortable with this many years ago but she was queen twice and dealt with people following her around calling her Your Majesty and insisting on holding her mug for her. She has learned to accept that she is not being demanding or cruel when she lets other people give her the respect of her rank and title - she's letting other people play their roles in the Dream. 

She gets a little jar of rosemary and heads towards the checkout. "Oh, when we're not at events or in garb, Cahaya is better though. Particularly if you're ever around people from my mundane work."

Nicole buys all the things and lets the cashier bag them and then - waits a half-second, because she knows that when she was in Sergia's position and talking to Raoulin about all this, she would've grabbed the bag and carried it for Raoulin and held the door for him because she was excited about the idea of being a squire and nervous about demonstrating that she meant it, and it made her feel better to do something anything in exchange for him constantly buying her Arizona Iced Tea. (If Sergia doesn't immediately jump on this then Nicole will just get the bag and walk out because she honestly prefers to carry her own stuff around and really doesn't need anyone to do that for her. She's certainly never going to ask Sergia to do this kind of thing if she isn't instinctively inclined to. But she built this kind of habit the last time she was queen, so people weren't constantly hard on her heels asking, "Your Majesty please let me take your bag for you," and it doesn't seem bad to pick it back up again.)

Sergia has done enough retaining that she does have an automatic bag-grabbing reflex, and by the time she starts to second-guess it she has realized that Sir Nicole gave her the opening and also already has the bag and is attempting to hold the door. Holding an automatic supermarket door for someone is kind of a joke, but she's entitled to one bit of youthful exuberance because she's going to be a squire to a knight!

And once they're back in the car with the door shut she gets serious again. 

"So, I think I may have been looking at things the wrong way yesterday? I was thinking of it as, the better I am at embodying some virtue the better I'll be at using artifacts of that virtue. But is it actually more like just needing to meet the minimum bar for a given artifact and then the artifacts themselves are more or less powerful, such that it's better to be a decent fit for a powerful thing nobody else can use than a great fit for something smaller? Because in that case I should be looking for the rarest virtues I can do at all and not the ones I'm best at."

"It's varied, artefact by artefact. Some of them just get stronger the more of their virtues you have. Some of them will only work if you meet some minimum bar, but will work fine for anyone who meets it. Some will just actively harm anyone who tries to use them without having the relevant virtue."

"Artefacts sitting in cupboards is bad. We need all the firepower we can get, so we put every artefact we can into someone's hand, and even if we weren't desperate for that - keeping artefacts in use means they're constantly building their level of virtue rather than stagnating, and sometimes you can even reform an artefact a bit with long use by someone very good, get it to understand its value in a way that is somewhat closer to the bearer - they both influence each other."

"For your very first artefact we should look at something that is an excellent fit for you because you're new and need support. But once you've learned some things, it might be that an artefact is becoming available because its bearer has retired or died, or we've just found something really powerful and not put it in anyone's hand yet, or you think you can activate something from Atlantis that nobody else can use, and then it's very good if you can step up and volunteer to use things that are difficult for us to find good users for, and also good if you can let an artefact go to someone else when it's something many other people could use as well or better. But that is not something to be worrying very hard about right now."

Nicole will be giving Sergia one of her things, probably, which means Sergia isn't adding much new power to the fight - just moving a bit of power from Nicole to Sergia - but she absolutely isn't going to say that out loud in case it makes Sergia want to go touch the stash of Atlantis artefacts that will probably rot her flesh off. Besides, she's adding her sword arm, which is always useful even if she isn't bringing any artefacts they weren't already bringing. 

"Makes sense. I'd like to learn more about what artifacts with known conditions are sitting in cupboards at some point, but I'll focus on learning the fighting part for now. Next question: how much notice do we have for fights, usually? Is it generally us going hunting at scheduled times, or will I be getting phone calls saying to meet you somewhere ASAP, or what?"

"Well, the dragon we're hunting tonight sent us a very polite message several months ago explaining that he was going to burn down Richmond in one year from that day if its people did not surrender and acknowledge the divine right of kings, and also something about people building things more glorious than cathedrals and letting divorced people in or something - I wasn't there since he doesn't speak English or French - apparently he was really quite apologetic about it but not particularly swayed by us asking him to, instead, do literally anything else. So that's one end of the spectrum. And the other is, yes, sometimes you get a call at three in the morning telling you to put your shoes on right now. But I'd be the only one calling you in for the latter sort of thing, for now." 

"Understood. When you say 'we're hunting tonight', am I going to be able to come along on that or will I need to spend more time than that on getting an artifact and learning to use it? I'd love to join but I don't want to be a liability. Or, more of a liability than necessary."

"I will bring you along on three conditions. Condition one is that you bond okay with the artefact I intend to give you. Condition two is that you swear to me that you will do exactly what I tell you to do when I tell you to do it until the hunt tonight is over, you will stay back out of trouble and take absolutely no unnecessary risks until the hunt tonight is over, you will look after that artefact extremely well, and you will generally behave as a loyal Atlantian until we figure out a time and place to formalise more specific and proper oaths and make you a squire."

"Condition three is your camp has to be packed out and clean, we're supposed to be offsite by three."

"That's a very reasonable set of conditions. I so swear, and I can have my stuff packed out and the camp stuff cleaned up in maybe half an hour, forty-five minutes?" Swearing to obey someone unconditionally without a 'so far as honor shall allow' or similar is technically a bad idea because they can order you to swear additional oaths, but Sir Nicole isn't going to do that.

"Then I swear that, if you meet my other conditions, I will allow you to accompany me tonight, and I will protect you as long as you do." Better to get in the habit of not asking for oaths if she won't give one in return. 

Actual, not-time-limited oaths can - should - wait until later. This is just a sensible temporary measure so she can bring Sergia along and check that she won't actually freeze up or panic or try to singlehandedly climb down a dragon's throat to stab it from the inside. She is not going to squire anyone who does any of those things. (Someone else might squire the latter sort of person - Reynhard squired Roger, after all - but she's honestly not cut out for it.)

"Half an hour's impressive. It's going to be a bit longer for Rosemary. We're all meeting at a restaurant around three-thirty, and then we're heading into the woods. I will say - this isn't going to be normal. A lot of the time it's maybe two or four or ten people on a quest together. This is going to be a big army because dragons are very dangerous."

"The advantages of not having a lot of stuff." Because half of it is still in her parents' house. "When you say 'dragon', is it actually dragon-shaped and fire-breathing and possibly invulnerable except for one weak spot, or is that more of a general danger level, or what? Do demons come in repeating types or is each one slightly unique?"

"Fire breathing scaly lizard. I admit, if you want the details on exactly what causes magic to sometimes be shaped like a dragon and other times be shaped like a basilisk or a cyclops or selkie, you're going to have to ask someone more focused on researching the actual mechanics of it. It's not my focus."

Nicole is a diplomat and a fighter and a musician and poet and linguist and textile artist and inspiration and that keeps her plenty busy without also trying to understand how dragons work. That doesn't stop her from feeling a twinge of shame at not being enough of an expert to teach Sergia everything.

"You can often make generalisations about what demons are like, but every time I've read an attempt to classify every type of demon into categories, I've felt like it was missing something important. For now, think of the world as having... layers. You can take a left turn in the wrong place in the woods and sort of be in a... fae realm."

"For every demon out there, there's a reason we didn't get it yet. Some of them aren't very noticeable, either because they're small and weak like gremlins, or they're good at hiding in plain sight like shapeshifters. Some of them are big and noticeable, but hiding in very remote places, like a mountaintop. Some of them are big and noticeable enough that we mostly stop them crossing from the fae realm into mundane world in the first place. Dragons are the latter sort of thing." 

'For every demon out there, there's a reason we didn't get it yet' is an excellent sentiment.

"So, if demons come from moral principles acquiring force over time, does that mean there's a constant stream of new ones forming and emerging from the fae realm, but they get gradually more modern as time goes on?"

"Yes. There's a constant stream of new ones forming, but the new ones are mostly weak because they're not old yet, and many are friendly and made of values that modern liberals can agree with. Anything that survives a few centuries will turn scary, both because it has now acquired more power and because it's from long enough ago that its values and standards are more often likely to be.... archaic." 

Nicole stares at the road for a few seconds, trying to gauge exactly how much Sergia is ready for right now. She's certainly been asking a lot of questions, and it seems like she mostly prefers to know things and to understand things on a higher level than where she needs to put a sword to make a dragon die. Okay. 

"Ever seen one of those population graphs that estimates human population for a really long time? Like, there's basically a line that looks flat at zero from 10,000 years ago until the mid-1700s, and then the line goes from being basically horizontal to being basically vertical." 

"Oh. There's going to be a lot of demons in--not very long, from a historical perspective, isn't there. If it hasn't started picking up already. Do we have a plan for that yet?" 

"Not very long from a historical perspective, but - we don't want to panic."

Nicole is, through great effort and long practice, radiating an immense meditative calm from every pore. She talks about it sort of like she has double-booked herself for two tournaments next week and isn't certain which she's going to prioritise yet. 

"The SCA was founded nearly six decades ago. In the early eighties we really settled on the consensus that things need to be roughly pre-1600 to be properly magically powerful - in the sense that they upgrade from a sword that is just unusually fast or accurate or shiny, to being a sword that can throw fireballs or talk or open portals - and roughly 1600 to 1650 you get the occasional rare powerful thing and lots of things that are beginning to show signs of magic but not fully developed yet." 

"The early eighties were forty, forty-five years ago and we're now seeing fully magical things from grey-period, 1600 to 1650, and things from 1650 to 1700 are starting to show those slight pre-magical glimmers. So we do have about fifty years, probably, for my generation to figure out the plan and your generation to execute it." 

"I'm interested in learning more about the long-term strategic picture but possibly I should not be asking about it today when I could be asking about things I'll need to know for this afternoon's fight instead. I know I won't be doing anything other than standing back and watching, but how do fights like this usually go? Are we going to try to get the element of surprise? Oh, also, are there artifacts that do healing?"

She's not in fact asking because of the Atlantis artifacts that rot your flesh off, because if there was healing magic good enough to fix that then she'd be allowed to touch them and she isn't, but the holy water at the back of the Pennsic chirurgeon tent was there for something, so maybe there's healing but it's weak or only good for a handful of things.