"I think for now you should focus really hard on growing as much as you can, yes. The important thing is to keep your feet on the path to becoming a good knight someday, and I will definitely let you know when I think you can start trying to solve civilizational problems without just getting yourself killed." Nicole isn't certain whether that means she shouldn't have mentioned anything, but... transparency is probably something Sergia values from what she knows of her, and she'll keep trying to suss out what Sergia needs as they go. "No surprises tonight, there's a chance the last-ditch negotiations succeed, if they don't then the main goal is to fight it somewhere that isn't its lair." 

"Yeah, I've got a tiny emergency heal in the glovebox if you want to look."

If Sergia looks in the glovebox she will find a tiny glass bottle inlaid with coloured sections like stained glass, depicting a fountain of rainbow-coloured water. The water inside just looks like water, really, but like it is somehow more water than water. It sloshes around in the bottle with an easy lightness that is so very liquid, reflects light in a shimmery way that is so very aquatic, and makes splashing sounds if shaken that are like the perfected essence of babbling stream noises. It's not that it doesn't look like water - it's just very water. Very very water. 

Having an organization that's sufficiently on top of shit that she can learn about a problem and then actually believe, with her heart and not just her head, that she can leave it alone and let someone else solve it is pretty great. Society as a whole solves lots of problems, but in a completely disorganized way where it's hard to rely on it and hard to say that any given thing wouldn't go better with one more person working on it.

"Oh wow, it's like water from a movie or something." She doesn't touch the bottle and very carefully shuts the glovebox again. "Uh, it's possible that this is a stupid question caused by watching my brother play too many video games, but if we do fight the dragon and kill it will its lair potentially have treasure?"

"Probably, yeah. It'd be weird for there to be nothing interesting in there. It's probably not going to be a giant pile of gold that the dragon sleeps on, though."

"Presumably the best case would be if it was a cool new artifact, right? I don't know what the less cool options are."

"I expect there to be at least one cool artefact on the skeleton of someone who died fighting the dragon long ago, and for us to be able to make some cool stuff from dragon scales, though we've a treaty with Midrealm where we give them the dragon teeth. They have a Dragon's Tooth award - that's their equivalent of a Shark's Tooth. Other kingdoms send us shark teeth for the same reason. I might also expect the actual lair to have some kind of hidden magic which is why the dragon chose it. It's certainly not native to the area - it moved in for a reason."

"Wow, neat! Do they give out the dragon teeth as tokens and just tell people they're plastic or animal teeth or something?" Awards are a great way to get people to keep an object forever and wear it around without telling them it's anything out of the ordinary, aren't they.

"I think they have some plastic ones and some medallions with a tooth painted on, to keep up the secret, but the people who get Dragon's Teeth and are in on the secret get real dragon teeth in addition to the cover-story ones, or they might give out the real ones and just not tell people they're real? But I've never actually been to the Midrealm, so for all I know they're shoving them under a gigantic pillow for the Draconic Tooth Fairy." 

Sergia giggles. "I assume that's a joke and there aren't actually tooth fairies? . . . There could totally be a Santa Claus or a Krampus, couldn't there."

"No tooth fairies I'm aware of. I'm not sure how old Santa is in terms of.... a widespread belief that a spirit of generosity visits people's houses every midwinter and gives kids gifts, I think that's a modern thing... but yeah I wouldn't be surprised by a fey shaped that way showing up in a few centuries from now. By that point they'll probably think it's a weird old medieval concept and be worried about him tracking chimney dirt on the carpet, and whether they end up fighting Santa will depend on the balance between how willing Santa is to respect their no-trespassing-in-people's-houses-while-they-sleep laws and how much value he's providing with the generosity thing."

(If the 2400s have anything close to a similar relationship with the 2000s as the 2000s have to the 1600s, which.... is not by any means guaranteed.)

Nicole turns the car off the main road and onto the long dirt-and-gravel one that leads into the woods, to the campsite in the fields. By now there's a steady trickle of cars leaving site and she sometimes has to pull over, scarily close to the ditch, to let one past.

"What else seems important to you to ask? I have questions for you, when you're out of your own questions." If they've gotten into the question of whether people will swordfight Santa in 2400 then possibly Sergia has exhausted her useful questions. 

"I think you have better questions than me at this point, yeah." She's turning over the question of whether her allegiance is ultimately to humanity as it is now, or to the march of human moral progress even when it inevitably goes places her current self would find abhorrent, but that's not something she can get the answer to by asking other people.

"What do you want to get out of being a squire? What do you need from me?"

This is the question that Nicole finds scary, because she's asking it seriously, not just to figure out the right kind of support to give Sergia but also to figure out whether she can actually support her at all. There are so many kinds of support that she's just not the right person for. She's never going to be much of a hugger, she doesn't suffer fools gladly and she doesn't have much time for movie nights. She wouldn't let things get this far if she thought Sergia was a fool who needed a lot of reassurance and babysitting but... there's also a reason she's never had a squire before. (Well, several reasons, including her zero-tolerance policy towards straight men with even the slightest hint of a crush on her. And her mildly intimidating household. She thinks those aren't issues here either.)

"I want to get really good at fighting. Both the kind I knew about last week and the demon-fighting, but the latter is more important. I want you to teach me as much of what you know about fighting as I can learn, and watch me fight and notice things I should work on and tell me to work on them. I expect that my desire to impress you and reflect well on you will cause me to work harder, which isn't something you would be doing but is a benefit I would get. I want to grow in all the knightly virtues but especially the ones that will let me use high-priority artifacts, and I want your advice and accountability there too. I want to be a knight of Atlantia someday and I want to be the best one I can be, and I want your guidance on that path because I think I'll be better for it.

"I'm also excited about the pageantry and about being part of a household and making connections with new people that way, but it's not necessary, I'd've wanted to learn from you even without those. Also I want your help not getting eaten by a dragon though I will try very hard not to need it."

Nicole lets out some of the tension in her shoulders and starts actually enjoying driving again. All of that is really very normal and doable and unconcerning. If anything too generic; the lack of any specific requests makes Nicole worry it's a passing-the-interview sort of answer. Not very worried, but... 

"Well, by now you mostly know how I teach. I'd have you swing by my place maybe weekly so we can work more intensively on your technique, if that works for you. What do you need more, less of? Are you the type to want weekly goals we put in a notebook or do you want me to mostly push you into useful situations where you'll learn?"

Also she should lighten the mood a little probably, though Sergia seems to be taking all the terrifying implications of magic pretty well, all things considered. 

"Also I'm not going to let a dragon eat you, it would be really embarrassing if dragons eat my first ever squire. Imagine what I'd have to say to the next person who asked if I'd ever had one before."

She laughs at that. "Weekly technique practice sounds good, as does the 'pushing me into useful situations' thing. Lots of practice fights and then talking about what I could have done differently. Also I should probably work more on spear and large group fighting than I have been, if I'm right that it's important for fighting demons; I prefer one-on-one sword and shield but if I'm going to be more useful sticking a spear through a shield wall I should get serious about it."

"Are you trying to get into a lot of big fights where we take a whole army to kill something big like a dragon, or are you trying to go on a lot of individual quests? We have both kinds of thing, and if you're running with me you'll end up in a lot of fairly small-group scrapes. I spend a lot of time going off to do diplomacy in the sort of places where we can't sensibly send a real diplomat because they'll be attacked."

(Nicole is sort of like a real diplomat, in the sense of having all the relevant skills, but she also has a sword. That is the key thing that prevents her really thinking of herself as overly diplomatic.)

"Nine foot spear won't do you much good if it's just three or four of us fighting our way through some old tangled fairytale forest to go beg an audience with a fey queen. But it'll be a godsend if you're fending off anything nasty that can fly." 

"Hm. So, first of all, I definitely think of this as the sort of thing where you can tell me what to do--if you'd been like, 'yes, work on spear, we need more spears' or 'no, we actually need mostly swordfighters right now' I'd've been happy to go along with either. But if it's a coin toss--I think I get better at sword faster than I get better at spear, for a given amount of work, and if I'm going to do a lot of small-group fights and only the occasional giant shield wall then I'd rather stick to mostly working on sword." There's definitely a part of her that thinks it's embarrassing not to be good at every weapon form out there, but she doesn't listen to it because it's better to be great at one thing than decent at everything.

Oh. Sergia's right, she can tell her what to do about that. It's one of those things that would've been overstepping for Nicole to give orders about when she served as queen or when she's marshalling or autocratting or any of the other roles in which she learned casual comfort with authority, but it can absolutely be her job to tell a squire about what weapons forms to train. She takes a moment to try and actually think through what she wants from Sergia.

"Split your time and do both for now. You'll come with me on some smaller quests and we'll figure out where you fit in, and you can specialise after you've got a better idea of how you handle yourself in the field. But I will absolutely want you well-rounded enough that you can pick up a spear when you need to, even if you focus on the sword. If you haven't hit the archery range yet we'll make time to get you the basics of ranged weapons, too. Even if you're not going to fight those forms, I want you to understand what your enemies are thinking and what your allies need, and you'll only truly understand a spearman or an archer if you've been one."

Nicole glances at the road and assesses that she's almost out of time for private questions in the car. When they get back to camp they'll both be busy packing up and getting moving.

"Next topic. One of the things that's nice about having a peer is you get attached to a social heavyweight, so if someone's on your case about something you're doing that annoys them, you can tell them to take it up with me. Most won't bother and will leave you alone, because most people deep down know when they're being asses. If someone does take it up with me and you are in the wrong, we will have an actual conversation about how you can make it up to them, I'm not the type to make you run laps of the battlefield. I do want to know beforehand if you're in any existing blood feuds so I can be prepared for that, and I know sometimes with second-gen people you've got an old duke who hates you because you peed in his cornflakes when you were seven years old, so - anyone I'm going to need to turn the ice on for?"

Someone caring enough about her combat effectiveness to think about which weapons she should learn and tell her to learn them feels pretty cool. She will totally do those things!

"Nobody in Atlantia--benefits of moving away for college--but there's a Magister Gurgeneu in Æthelmearc who's been in beef with my mom since before I knew what beef was. No idea what about, so it's either embarrassing, adult content, or demon-related. Speaking of which, is there any demon-related drama I need to know about, or has everyone who hates each other come up with some excuse to hate each other in public?"

"I can probably find out, about Gurgeneu and your mom, if you want to know." Nicole isn't above using her extensive connections to be nosy. She figures knowing who can and can't work together is part of her job, and while she's generally too dignified to repeat gossip she's not above hoarding it. She will probably have to swear Sergia to secrecy at some point so she can give her a proper education in the topic. 

"I am not going to summarise every single fight on this car ride but sometimes people get really quite heated about the topic of demons and who gets what artefacts and who is going on what quests. Luckily life-or-death situations also have a way of making people understand that they need their allies more than they need to say snarky things on Facebook, so it balances out to mostly people being usual SCAdian levels of very nice. Just listen to people talking about some of the more notable artefacts and figure out your thoughts before you gush over how cool they are or let someone get you up in arms about something being used that sounds like it shouldn't be allowed. And I will fill you in when things come up, and are important. Like Master Isenburn won't be there tonight because he was responsible for trying to negotiate with this dragon, isn't convinced that he failed, and is upset that we're resorting to violence, and that's delicate and you probably don't want to bring it up. He's not breaking his oath, the Crown told him he's allowed to not be there, and that's good enough for me at least."

"I think I'd probably rather not find out about my mom; she respects my privacy and I should respect hers. But I appreciate the offer. And--man, I feel bad for Master Isenburn. I'd hate to see people killing each other when I thought I could prevent it. I definitely won't bring it up with anyone."

"One last question before we get back: Lucia mentioned that she doesn't know as much as she might because of her artifact's conditions. Do you know what if any of what we've been talking about is stuff I shouldn't mention to her?"

"Good attitude." In response to the comment about privacy.

Nicole runs back through the topics she's covered in her head.

"The important thing to keep in mind is... Lucia can't tolerate something she thinks is wrong for the sake of some greater good. The rest of us can make tradeoffs to preserve our own safety and sanity and alliances, but for her the second she makes one too big she's going to lose her power and get burned - God even knows how badly. I think she knows about the general class of nonconsensual memory wipes existing, but don't tell her about individual instances, just in case. Don't talk to her about... whatever is going to start happening in the twenty-second century. We're trying to prepare her as thoroughly as possible for when she figures it out on her own, because she's going to do something unwise like... go burn down some museums to make thoroughly sure not a single artefact survives from evils like Leopold of Belgium, or Hitler, or Andrew Jackson. In general expect that if you tell her something bad is happening she will try to stop it from happening, and she understands that sometimes this means people won't tell her bad things are happening because it isn't safe or sane for her to try and stop it."

Nicole gives Sergia a genuine warm smile. "Glad you're already looking out for your friend."

"Alright. I can do that." Partially by being unfortunate amounts of inhibited around her for a while, but better safe than sorry.

They have reached the campsite. Nicole takes her time about fussing with the parking brake, tidying a few things from the centre console and gathering up the shopping, so Sergia has however long she needs to readjust to the outside world. Nicole thinks of cars as liminal spaces where people can say anything. Particularly her car, which is fun and dreamy and (when she puts the roof down) makes her feel a little bit like she's starring in a movie rather than being someone with so many responsibilities. Back in camp she'll need to be all serious and focused and calm about packing everything down neatly.

"Alright, better to do this sooner rather than later if you're coming along tonight, so you've got more time to learn. So I won't be too ceremonial about it..."

She opens up the boot and rummages around in a gigantic pile of foul-smelling armour, bags of folded fabric, leatherworking tools and paper folders until she finds an old, worn wooden box. The top is carved with intertwined swords and roses, with wicked thorns curled around its corners. The clasp is a simple bronze hook that rotates in and out of the matching bronze circle in the lid.

"Here's a loan - which can become a gift, if you stick around. This has been passed down through Rosemary for as long as I've been alive, and used to belong to a minor French folk saint sometime in the fifteenth century."

The box contains a very thin piece of dark blue fabric. It is obvious that incredible care has been taken about preserving it, though a museum curator would still weep to see it; it's been repaired and patched and darned and generally maintained more like a tool in constant use than an artwork that must be left unmodified. There is a tiny piece of embroidery running along the edge which shows a chain of hands held in other hands, all interwoven together. 

She's held older objects but none of them were textiles. "Woah. Thank you. Am I supposed to carry it, or wear it, or carry it in the box, or . . .?"

"Either borrow the box or figure out some other way to keep it safe when you're not using it. It's a veil of loyal calling, it - well it's easier to show it than explain it."

She gestures for Sergia to pass her the cloth. 

This has been a portion of Nicole's power and her skillset for years. It will be strange to be without it, though strategically it doesn't quite fit her role any more. But, she reminds herself, she won't be without it. The magic will be in the hands of someone who perhaps isn't as skilled with it yet, but gets to entirely focus on it rather than worrying about everything else Nicole worries about.

Still, there's a little sadness in Sir Nicole lifting up the ancient heirloom for probably (hopefully!) the last time and draping it around her hair, over one eye, in a carefully-rippled waterfall down over her shoulders. Half the world turns dark blue, and in that dark blue part of her vision, Sergia has a shining golden outline - as though a flame was hidden within her. 

Nicole takes several steps back and then whispers under her breath, so quietly that Sergia might normally not be able to tell that she spoke, "This works on shared loyalties. You hear me?" 

Sergia will feel those words as clear as though they were shouted - but in her heart, not in her ears.