"Honestly I don't think I get a ton of use out of pelling? Like, I'll hit one if it's there, but when I want to work on my arm strength I'd rather lift weights and when I want to work on everything else I'd rather fight pickups. Hitting a pell is just too different from hitting someone who's moving." She gives her drop spindle another flick to keep it going and drafts more wool.

"I pell because people usually aren't willing to fight pickups with me in the woods at dinnertime, but I would also prefer to hit someone who's moving, if you're volunteering...?"

Lucia settles back into her camp chair with her newly acquired bowl of soup. It's a folding plastic chair in an ugly shade of faded orange, but covered up with a keepsake cotton cover sewn to fit it so that it won't look out of place. Lucia herself is hidden under five layers of wool and still cold. 

"Here and now? Sure, why not, it's not like I changed clothes. Actually I should let you eat that soup first."

Under her giant wool cloak she's still in a four-year-old tunic that started out nice, got demoted to armor tunic, and is now about 50/50 sweat stains and patches. She'd've changed if there'd been court but court is tomorrow so fuck it.

Erik: "You're going to fall in the ditch in the dark."

Roger: "And knowing Luce, she's going to come back here soaking wet with freezing mud and try to persuade us that she enjoyed it."

Cináed: "While I would be happy to stand around and marshal, I'd gently remind you that swords make very loud bangs and some people are trying to sleep."

Lucia: "Yeah, fair. I was thinking tomorrow after court."

Lucia has changed; her fighting tunics tend to get soaked with sweat, and then it's very unpleasant once the sweat gets cold. She's not in the fancy Italian Renaissance gown she'll wear to court tomorrow (she hates overly elaborate gowns but she'll still wear one to court because she wants to be proper and decorous) - she changed into a simple warm Viking tunic in her household's red and gold, worn over leggings and a shirt. As the temperature dropped she layered her jerkin over it, then her cloak, then one of her blankets over her cloak. Lucia takes chills easily. 

"Oh right, sleep, that's a thing. Tomorrow after court it is. Maybe the mud'll dry out some tomorrow morning, even." Spin spin spin.

Erik is mock offended. "So I won't see either of you at the party tomorrow? You reject Erik's free fried chicken? You toss him aside like fried liver?" He is doing the voice he does for Miette.

"I think it's chopped liver," Aleksei offers.

"Your face is chopped liver," Roger mumbles, then dodges out of the way when Aleksei throws a balled-up napkin at him. 

Lucia had genuinely not been expecting anyone to take her up on the offer. Normally she says that she wants to get up at the crack of dawn to run a few miles before she starts her day, and everyone tells her she is insane and that they'll see her later after she comes to her senses, and then she has to do it on her own without any coffee. She's come to terms with the fact that most of the boys don't want to (don't need to) work the way she does, and sometimes think she's... she doesn't quite understand why "sweaty tryhard" is a negative thing, and nobody would say those words in the SCA, but whatever the negative thing about that is.

She already likes this arrival from Aethelmearc, but now she likes her a lot more.

"I don't think we're busy - there should be plenty of time between court and the party if I'm not cooking dinner - let me just double check with Duke Migliorotto in the morning about whether I'm supposed to be doing anything."

"I was figuring I'd help pack up the thrones and whatnot after court, because I'm retaining, but that'll take like ten minutes. We can beat each other up and then eat fried chicken." It's so good that there are people who actually like to cook, so she can burn a gajillion calories and then shovel bread and meat into her face about it.

"Lucia's going to be a bad influence on you," grumbles Aleksei, mostly joking. "You'll be a typical Atlantian thug in no time."

Roger shakes his head. "Never rely on retaining to take ten minutes. You'll think that, and then the queen will hear that you like spinning and come up with twenty people that she needs to introduce you to right now because they also like spinning, and then they'll all try to help you."

There's some sort of meaningful look being exchanged between Roger and Lucia, but Lucia makes a wiggling hand gesture and breaks eye contact, and Roger goes back to tending the fire. 

"It's true. It happened to me," Cináed adds gravely, covering up whatever was exchanged. "I accidentally came home with ten pounds of fabric and a box of cookies." 

"These are the risks we take for Queen and Kingdom," she says, giving Lucia a questioning glance but not expecting this to yield much in the way of explanation.

"It's alright. If you end up not having time, I can literally just hit my pell like I was going to anyway." Lucia avoids the questioning glance by busying herself with her soup. 

"Yeah, but fighting is fun and you're cool, so here's hoping. "

Lucia nods (mouth too full of soup to reply), and for a moment there's a comfortable peace - though not really any quiet. The fire crackles and pops, the trees rustle occasionally in the slight breeze, and in the far distance the pirate-mercenary-anarchist camp is drumming and cheering.

Aleksei breaks the spell by rising from his wooden bench, brushing his trousers off and draining the last of his cider. "I should get to bed. I can't be too tired tomorrow, someone has to keep us all vaguely tuneful."

Erik takes his cue to groan and get up as well, tidying his cup and bowl into a neat pile to wash up. "I hate to sleep this early but I think I'm on the rota for breakfast."

"You are," Cináed confirms quietly.

"Every day we confront such horrors." Erik isn't really complaining, though being the first awake to make coffee and bacon is hardly his favourite chore.

The other relative newcomers around the fire (except Samora) also make their excuses and start packing away scarves and cups and craft projects and armour-repair tools. Then Erik and Aleksei and their unnamed companions slip away into the darkness in search of their tents, chased by a chorus of, "Goodnight!" and, "Sleep well!" and "Don't let the radioactive tarantulas bite!"

Lucia, Cináed, Roger and Samora remain around the campfire. Often this is where the conversation might find itself becoming less rowdy banter, and more gossip or advice or philosophy; small groups can cover topics that larger groups might be too public for, and late night feels somehow appropriate for deep meaningful conversations, and Roger in particular finds it easier to talk about his feelings when he's had alcohol. 

Darkness does make it easier to say things sometimes, doesn't it. Darkness and only having a small number of people to pay attention to the reactions of.

"So there's something I'm kind of looking for advice on."

"How can we help?"

Lucia can sense this is something important to Sergia, so she makes a show of putting down her mostly-empty soup bowl down by the fireside and folding her hands in her lap. (She doesn't realise that she comes off a little intense when she focuses her full attention on someone.)

Samora doesn't mind; being able to take things seriously is important. She's packed up her spinning as well. "When you two got belts," she gestures to Lucia and Roger, "did you ask for them, or did you wait to be offered?"

"Sir Reynhard asked me. It was actually Katherine that invited me to his household practice, so I went there a few times and started kind of fighting with their unit. Right after I got my Osprey, Reynhard joked about how they wanted to keep me but he was sure that some knight would snap me up as a squire now that people were paying attention to me, and it would be such a pity if they couldn't keep me, and I totally didn't get what he was hinting at whatsoever." Roger grins. "He had to sit me down and explicitly offer it." 

Lucia pauses thoughtfully for a long time, figuring out how to phrase this. She doesn't often admit to this, but she likes Sergia and wants her to be prepared for all the different things that might happen. "The first time I asked His Grace, he said no. Apparently he thought I didn't understand what I wanted to sign up for, but he made it clear it wasn't a forever no, just - he thought I wasn't ready. So I worked really hard and got a lot better at fighting, and then I asked him again and he said no again, and I didn't want to be that person who pesters someone after getting two nos, so I kind of poked around the subject until he gave me a list of things I'd need to do before I'd be ready. Then I did all of them and I was waiting for him to notice, but he didn't, so I gave up and asked him and then he said yes." 

He'd also said a lot of other things, about how he'd been hoping she'd ask again because she really had seemed like she had potential (and how he'd wanted to say yes in the beginning but had been more worried about whether she'd regret it then whether he would), but Lucia gets self-conscious about saying anything that feels too much like bragging. Her knight has repeatedly made it clear to her that even if other people expect more from her because she's squired to a superduke, she's still not allowed to name-drop him like it's a claim to rank; squire is a job, not a title. Lucia recognises Samora's question for what it is, too, and she's trying to focus on information that might be useful to her comrade. When she'd been trying to figure out whether to approach Migliorotto, she'd done the same sort of poking-around-the-subject-without-really-saying-it, unable to speak openly for fear of the supreme awkwardness of everyone knowing that she'd asked and he'd said no. 

"Thanks, that helps some. There's someone I want to ask, and I'd be fine just waiting and trying to be impressive, but I don't know if they even want a squire, like as a general thing. And if they just don't want to deal with having dependents or whatever then I want to know that so I can stop hoping, but if I'm not good enough I don't want to stick them with the awkwardness of turning me down."

Or worse, telling her they don't like having dependents because they don't want to say "it's because you suck" to her face. If she sucks she wants to know that, and ideally exactly how and why, so she can stop.

Cináed frowns a little. "I don't think it's the right framing, that it's all about whether you're good enough. It's about whether you're both the right fit for each other." He debates internally for a few seconds, then continues, "I've turned down two people. You're just as much allowed to say no as they are." 

He gets a surprised look from Roger, who hadn't realised Cináed had turned people down. Cináed isn't going to name names, though. 

"Yeah, for sure. And I'd want to talk about it with them and make sure we were on the same page about stuff, before actually taking a belt, I just don't know whether--actually, you know what, this conversation is going to work a lot better if I just say who it is. It's Sir Nicole. She's been giving me some great advice at practices, and I think I could learn a ton from her, but I don't want to make her think I've just been fishing for a belt this whole time and make things awkward. God," she laughs, "I sound like a high schooler trying to work up the nerve to ask their crush out." But have you considered that Sir Nicole is SO skilled and SO fast and Sergia wants to be her when she grows up.

"I'm going to say so many nice things at your funeral," Roger says immediately. "You are going to die horribly, but I will- ow!"

Cináed's boot is already poised to kick Roger in the shins a second time.

"Okay, I deserved that a little," Roger admits. 

"You did," Cináed concurs simply, but with no malice or hard feelings in his voice. He moves his foot back to a comfortable spot, outstretched towards the fire. 

Lucia spreads her hands in a calming gesture, directed at the whole fire. "You're not going to die - it's just - maybe an unfortunate choice of language. I think we have all sounded like a high schooler nervous about asking a crush out - okay, maybe self excepted - they're not dissimilar conversations in some ways. It's just - Sir Nicole in particular deals with a lot of people half her age having crushes on her." 

Lucia also isn't sure whether this is a good idea, but Roger is reacting like someone who has gotten himself thoroughly on Nicole's bad side, and it ought to be quite possible for Sergia to avoid doing that so long as everyone is very clear that Sergia definitely doesn't have a crush on her. Cináed has already kicked him, so Lucia decides she doesn't need to also glare at Roger. 

Sergia facepalms. "Oh, god, what, no, completely a metaphor, she's old enough to be my mom probably and also I don't swing that way." Obviously there's nothing wrong with any combination of preferences there, but if and when it does become time for romance to be part of her life she will be looking for men. "I just think she's really cool and I want to be as good as she is at kicking the asses of people a foot taller than me."

"That's a pretty good start." Lucia nods slowly. "Yeah, she's exactly the person I go to for advice on adapting technique for me being smaller and... shaped differently to the average Atlantian fighter." 

She might phrase that differently if Roger and Cináed weren't there, but in front of the male fighters she's in the habit of carefully not calling attention to gender, pretending that there's some basically uninteresting and unimportant reason why she's smaller and has to do more strength training and has to shape her armour differently and sometimes has to deal with people being prejudiced and struggles to find herself in the songs they sing about Arthuriana. No pattern to draw attention to connecting those things, nothing to see there, move along. It's not a topic she wants to constantly be drawn into, and she doesn't want her gender to be important to how they see her, and it seems like it makes them more comfortable sometimes. 

(She might be nonbinary, too, but she's tucking that thought away in the back of her mind to be examined however many years down the line when she's done figuring out everything else.)

"I know she's turned people down before, but I don't think she dislikes the idea of having associates, just - wants to make sure they have the right reasons." 

Lucia's still worried that this counts as a bad reason. If she's ever a knight, she'll definitely take the time to help out the junior female fighters with adapting things, but she'd never want to feel that someone was coming to her for advice because of her gender. But she ought to let Sergia talk before jumping to any conclusions about that, and besides she doesn't know Sir Nicole well enough to really know whether she'd object, and really Lucia is reading way too much into the phrase 'people a foot taller than me' which might have not been about gender at all. 

Cináed figured out Lucia's hangups around gender months ago, and is quietly being sensitive about the subject. He leans back and steeples his fingers in type of his face. "Let's back up a second. Before you even think about whether you want to ask Sir Nicole. Are you interested in being a squire? It's a big thing..." Cináed counts the months since he met Sergia on his fingers. "The standard advice is don't even think about this question in your first year, I know you were in Aethelmearc for your whole life before you came to Atlantia though." 

"I've wanted to be a knight since I was about five, yeah, not that I understood anything about what it meant back then. I've wanted to be a squire since . . . more recently than that, but still a long time? I like the idea of having someone teaching me in particular, someone who knows my strengths and weaknesses and cares enough to hold me accountable for improving. Both in prowess and in--all the other things that you can't learn just by fighting ten thousand pickups. Being able to fight well is so so important but it's not the only thing that matters, if it was the only thing that mattered then I'd have as much fun learning karate or something. It's about honor and chivalry and being part of the tradition. And I know that different people have different ideas of what kind of relationship a knight and their squire should have, and if Sir Nicole's idea of it doesn't line up with mine then I won't do it even if she's interested. But--there are a lot of great knights in Atlantia, I don't have to have lived here a year to notice that. But the goal isn't to join the coolest household I can join, it's to become the best knight I can be. And I think learning from Sir Nicole is the way to do that."

Lucia looks around at Roger and Cináed, who both make small gestures of deferral, and sighs. Cináed is probably the best-equipped to handle this tactfully, but he's halfway asleep so it falls to her. She's never tried to give someone The Talk before...

"None of us would dissuade you from wanting to be a knight - I mean, we all want that too. And those are the right things to say, I mean, about caring about honour and chivalry and tradition. Though if you don't want to join a household and have it be a whole thing then you should probably ask someone who isn't old blood Rosemary-"

Roger interrupts to ask, "She's House Rosemary? Since when?"

Cináed sighs. "Since forever, she just doesn't go around in a household tabard 24/7. Her fighting style is literally carbon-copied from Sir Raoulin's." 

Roger makes an expansive shrugging gesture and goes back to nursing a drink. 

"The point is," Lucia says, choosing her next words very carefully, "Once you've uh - visibly got a red belt, things change. People will think they can hit you harder, you'll get a lot of worse bruises on the battlefield, people are watching you and you'll be conscious of it whenever you want to, um, turn down a pickup or say you're too tired to help with dishes after dinner-"

There's things Lucia can't say, now, things that aren't her place to say or reveal but she's really trying to give a sense of how seriously she thinks the topic should be taken. "My knight says being a knight isn't something you just are at an event, it's something you have to be all the time, you're supposed to be chivalrous every moment of every day. So you have to be really really sure if you're publicly putting your feet on that path."

"That was not meant as a knock on households, households are great, I don't know a ton of Rosemary people but I bet they're lovely. As for the other thing--I think I'll be okay? If what you're trying to say is that I don't meet the standard expected of squires then okay, I'll just have to work harder until I do, but the expectation doesn't bother me. However good I am, that's how good I am and I should get better. And, well, I can't say I'm looking forward to my first authentic Atlantian concussion," she says with a smile in her voice, "but if I don't like it I'll just have to dodge better." 

"I wasn't saying that! You're really good! You have some awesome reads, honestly, I feel like I can't leave anything open against you because you'll always spot it - I'm just saying, uh, your whole life might change more than you expect. And you should definitely be ready for that and make sure you're not, um, halfway thinking about pursuing this but halfway still tempted to go become a karate champion or something. It's.... a lot harder to change your mind afterwards-" Lucia strains and reaches for a reason she can reveal as to why it's hard to go back- "because people might, uh, gossip a lot if you hand a belt back?"

She already knows it's not going to dissuade Sergia but she feels like she has to say at least some of the pieces of the script that was said to her. 

"I can tell that you're taking this really seriously and that you want me to make good decisions and I appreciate that. But I'm not going to stop wanting this. It's--not my whole life, I have classes and career plans and stuff, but it's a lens I see the whole world through. It's the culture I grew up in. And I can tell that--people who have gone farther down that path than me--take it extremely seriously, and I can tell they're right to, and I expect that when I understand more I'll be the same way." And that's as much as she's going to say right now. She might have said too much already.

Lucia finds that she is too strongly in agreement to be able to say anything negative. "I feel that - about the lens. It's the way I approach my whole life, and it's a way that I aspire to and I couldn't ever stop wanting it if I tried. And I look up so much to everyone who's - chased that dream further than I have, into the places I want to go. And trying to be like them makes me better at everything else, like I would've failed high school math if I wasn't trying to be diligent and faithful and like - pursue excellence in all things and all those words I learned at SCA campfires." 

She realises she's excited to have another comrade who she can talk to about these things, even though she's been trying so hard to be the stern older fighter like the old squires that tried to convince her that squiredom was all about polishing armour and fetching heavy objects and having shoes thrown at them (she knew that was fake, she's never seen anyone throw a shoe at a squire except when the squire thought it was hilarious) and made her stand her ground about it. She's not very good at giving The Talk. "Um, that doesn't mean I necessarily always love everyone though. I've got a squire-cousin I can't stand. Have you met all the people Sir Nicole camps with?" 

"Only the ones who come to events around here, and I should meet the rest! I like most people, especially most SCAdians, once I get to know them, but it's good to get to know them before we're all living in tents right next to each other."

"And I really hear you about the SCA being an inspiration for academics. I could go off on a whole tangent about how thinking about history made me realize I want to go to law school eventually." Hopefully her own lack of math talent won't sink her GPA too much.

"Right, SCAdians are just my favourite people, I don't know what it is about medieval reenactment that is a magnet for people who are so lovely."

Yep, Lucia is bad at this. She wants to say something useful about the dynamics and the added pressure of being part of one of the old households with a million ancient traditions, but she can't figure out a way to say it that doesn't sound like she's complaining about her people. Which she wouldn't ever do. Also, doesn't law school keep people busy - is that going to be compatible with all the secret responsibilities? - but no, that is something Nicole and Sergia can figure out between themselves. 

Cináed is willing to come to Lucia's rescue. "OK, you should probably make a list of things to ask her if you ask her and put that on it - like, whether you're supposed to be super involved with her household."

Cináed muses about the various reasons he's not got a red belt. "There's a bunch of standard warnings - like, don't squire for anyone who seems like they're just collecting squires so they can take credit for them."

"Don't squire for anyone who you wouldn't let crash on your couch, mundanely," Roger adds.

Cináed nods, and adds, "I've heard people say don't squire for someone at the same primary practice as you," though with a wiggly hand gesture that says he isn't sure what he thinks about that advice. 

Roger is willing to be a little less polite. "I don't know, I kind of think that's bullshit."

"What's the worry there, just that you'll see too much of them and not learn as much from other people? I feel like that's the kind of problem where if you both notice it happening you can just agree to stop doing that."

"That, yeah, that you might only pay attention to them and start ignoring everyone else's advice. But also that other people might hesitate to push you too hard or call you out if you're misbehaving if your knight is always right there and they assume that's his - uh, her job. Like - people might not want to beef with you if they think that means beefing with a duchess."

"Ah, yeah, that's a risk. I'd rather--well, ideally I'd rather people not have beef with me, but if they do I'd rather they say it than sit there stewing. And that's a hard thing to get common knowledge about, even assuming Sir Nicole is on the same page about not protecting me too much."

"Yeah, my knight tells everyone to take it up with him if they have a problem with me, and he's plenty comfortable making it clear to me if I fucked up." 

Roger grins. "Yeah, if anything we're all protecting Lucia from Miglio. We're all, hey Lucia psssst you're missing your lanyard, so she can fix it before His Grace starts making her run laps of the field about it." 

Cináed adds, "Or making her bring her pell to war, that's insane-" 

"I told you, he has no opinions about that!" Lucia objects, somewhat defensively. "I do that for me!" 

She turns back to Sergia, changing the subject. "With Sir Nicole... I don't know, I certainly would just tell you if I had beef with you but I think if I had beef with her I would possibly just hide myself under the nearest tarp and wait to die?" She's trying to be humorous but she is genuinely a little intimidated.

A lot of the old fighters are intimidating, but they're scary in ways Lucia knows how to deal with; they're seven feet tall and good with a sword and irritable. She doesn't mind bruises, works her ass off, is meticulous about using everyone's correct titles, and knows they'll forgive her for irritating them when she's next to them in a shield wall. Sir Nicole doesn't even like people using her correct title - she insists on sir even though she's a duchess, which tripped Lucia up the first ten times (until she understood how badly Nicole probably wants to be a duchess by right of arms rather than a duchess by courtesy, and then she remembered). She's intimidating in this cold, perfectly polished and put-together way that makes Lucia feel like she's a clunky mess by comparison. A lot of the Roses are, but Nicole manages to look like she doesn't have a hair out of place even when she's just taken her helmet off, and Lucia is sort of convinced that's only possible with witchcraft. 

"You? No way. If you really believed you were in the right about something and she was in the wrong, you'd say it."

"Okay, yes, I would. I would say it. And then before she could respond I would swirl the tarp around me like a cloak, fall on the ground wrapped in it, and be all, you can't see me! You can't see me! I disappeared! With magic!" 

Sergia cracks up and is laughing too hard to speak for several seconds.

Roger shakes his head. "I think Sir Nicole just hates the cut of my jib, or the way I breathe or something," he complains glumly.

Cináed frowns. "No, she's just - like that. A bit aloof maybe. I think she has to be, with her mundane job. She's not actually mean."

"She's not mean to you," Roger protests. "She once told me I was throwing my wrap wrong and I told her I was throwing it the way Reynhard showed me and then instead of explaining it she just hit me in the inside of my elbow where I've not got any armour fifteen times and the bruise lasted a month-"

"Sounds like you were throwing your wrap wrong," Cináed observes dryly. "And she figured out how to make you listen."

Sergia gets her shit together and sits back up. It sounds like Roger was throwing his wrap wrong but better for Cináed to say that than her. "I continue to not be scared off by any of this." She's not, actually, completely unafraid, but it's not of any of the stuff they're talking about.

"You are a little bit scared, though, right? It's one thing to not be scared off but if you weren't nervous at all then something would be off." 

"There's a very serious Kalomeros tradition where whoever is the newest of the red belts has to buy beer for all of the rest of us," Roger says with a perfectly straight face. "You should be appropriately nervous about that. If you don't then you get thrown to the wolves and eaten."

Cináed tries to kick him again but this time Roger is prepared and dodges. 

"I am a little bit scared, yeah. Not of the beer thing, obviously. Of the . . ." surely everyone here knows at least as much as she does. "Of the stakes of it all. Of the possibility of screwing up in a way I can't fix. But fear exists for a reason, it's how we know to take things seriously."

Of the stakes of it all. How much does Sergia know about the stakes?

Lucia grew up in the SCA, unlike Roger and Cináed. Even before she was told all the secrets, she guessed - felt, really - that the fighting was more important than anyone was letting on, but nobody had actually told her anything until she'd gotten her red belt. (Though of course that wasn't a prerequisite - they'd told Cináed after getting his Kraken. Point was - probably nobody had told Sergia. But maybe she had a sense of something more.)

"The stakes are a lot higher than whether pineapple goes on pizza, yes. Especially with something like Crown, or when you're deciding whether to take a blow and your honour is always at stake. Honour is everything." Someone who couldn't resist the temptation to shrug off a blow in order to win a tournament might not be trustworthy to shrug off other, more important temptations to stray from the path. "And the Dream, the integrity of it - it relies on us striving towards the standard just as much as on the peers upholding the standard, I think. If we stop believing it matters and chasing it, then it will die."

Maybe die more literally than Lucia's allowed to say. But this much at least would be true even if those secrets didn't exist. 

Sergia is now pretty sure her guess was right: whatever the thing is it's something squires usually get told. She doesn't know it yet--technically she doesn't even know for sure there's a secret, but over the past few years it's gotten to the point where she'd be shocked if there wasn't, and most of her uncertainty is about the details. 

"Yeah. And that matters, because--it's not just about us, right? It's about--everyone who's going to benefit from it down the line, the way we're benefitting from the people who came before us. The world is a better place for having this Dream in it."

"Yeah. We all need a Dream. Because the modern world is full of nightmares, right?"

Lucia ignores the looks that Cináed and Roger are giving her, both trying to say too far with their eyes. There's plenty of mundane things she could be talking about. 

Roger thinks this is too far. "Yeah, nightmares like the one I had last night where I was on the battlefield and my pants fell down and I couldn't get them back up again because all my armour was in the way."

The evil look he's shooting Lucia probably makes things worse rather than better, though. 

Oh no, she has to choose between social harmony and--probably the other option is not "find out the whole thing tonight", Lucia seemed to be sounding out how much she knew already more than considering whether to say it straight out. Which makes the social harmony option more appealing. Still, she takes a moment to gauge Lucia's reaction before speaking.

If Sergia doesn't say anything, Lucia backs off a little. She thinks Sergia's perceptive enough that she probably suspects something - they're both second-gen and she knows that she suspected before she was told - but Cináed and Roger aren't wrong, she shouldn't be telling Sergia if Sergia doesn't know. That's not her place. She hurriedly forces a laugh at Roger's joke and goes back to the subject at hand.

"So, you're sure you want to be a knight someday, she doesn't seem like a collector or like she's just using you or wanting to take credit for your achievements, you think you like her household, you'd let her crash on your couch and you think she'd let you crash on hers, the fighting style she teaches is one you want to learn..." Lucia is counting off criteria on her fingers, though she isn't sure why since she isn't counting towards any particular number. It just kind of helps her keep the points straight in her head. "She's definitely someone who can advocate for you, uh, hm..."

"You don't have a crush on her," Roger adds cheerfully, with an additional raised finger. 

Cináed may as well join in with the finger-counting. "You think you learn well from her and you think she's got more to teach you, she's not too busy with an office to be able to teach you, she's someone you actually look up to as a person and not just a fighter. I can't personally imagine having a beer with her but I assume you like her as a person. That definitely sounds like you should just ask her and see what she thinks? The worst she can say is no."

"Hm, I..." Lucia hesitates, not quite sure that they've covered everything despite the total of ten raised fingers around the little firelit circle. "I guess, one of the more useful interesting questions someone asked me when I was uncertain about this - well, one of the things my knight told me I had to do before I took a red belt was I had to ask a bunch of people for advice about it - someone asked me if I thought he had any really serious flaws, because if I couldn't say anything then it meant I was putting him on a pedestal and that wasn't a good basis for a relationship. Are there things you don't like about her?"

She hates speaking ill of people who aren't here but they have a point. "Uh, as far as I can tell she's 'on' one hundred percent of the time? She doesn't do 'sitting around a fire telling jokes about stuff', or at least not where I can see it. Also I think sometimes she forgets that not everyone has read every book she's read, but possibly the problem there is that I've read objectively not enough books and am self-conscious about it." That last thing will hopefully be solved by taking college history classes until she's enough books.

Lucia used to share that discomfort (speaking ill of her knight felt like a sin) until she figured out that her cohort-mates thought her knight was a cantankerous stuffy old relic, and if she acknowledges that he is maybe a little irritable and old-fashioned then they might be open to seeing the immense respect she has for him despite that, whereas if she tries to pretend that he's a ray of sunshine then they'll just think she is insane. (Admittedly, they think she is insane anyway, but that's because her love for studying the blade verges on an all-consuming obsession that makes the passion of Shakespearean love sonnets seem like mild interest by comparison. And that's an okay reason for everyone to think she's crazy, since it is pretty accurate.) 

"And that's something you can deal with? Like, a couple years from now you're not going to be sitting around the campfire going man I wish I had someone I could tell stupid jokes to? Or goddamnit I am so tired of reading, I wish nobody expected me to read any goddamn books? I don't think Roger's knight has asked him to read a single book in his life."

(It took Lucia a year to figure out that she could tell her knight dumbass dirty jokes, and that when he sighed and said things like you can make jokes that bad once you can defend yourself from the consequences that was his way of joking back.) 

"My twelfth century English persona probably wouldn't have been literate. It would be terribly inauthentic for me to ever read a book," Roger says with a practised air of innocence. 

"If she expects me to get my garb game up to the standards of hers I might actually die in a horrible sewing machine incident, so that's definitely something I should ask her about." She's not even sure how much of Sir Nicole's garb is stuff she made herself--Sir Nicole is a Duchess and at least in Æthelmearc that would mean she had gotten presents from half the garb Laurels in the kingdom--but at least some of it is, and everything she wears out of armor is prettier than everything Sergia owns.

"Well, I already promised to say nice things at your funeral. I will say here lies Sergia, yet another squire cruelly bullied by an evil sewing machine, whose example inspires us all to wear early period rectangles and renounce floofy Renaissance nonsense. It will be a worthwhile sacrifice for the cause of finally getting Luce to shut the fuck up about Venetian lace." Roger is too tired and too drunk to be good at staying serious. 

"You can make a list of things to ask her about. I made a really long list before I got my red belt and we went through the whole thing while on the eight-hour drive to Pennsic. Probably be prepared to have a conversation that long, by the way, don't wait until this kind of hour to ask her. And - find a time when you're mentally ready to think about a whole bunch of new stuff." 

"Yeah, for sure. Maybe at some event where there's a big gap between the end of the fighting and the start of court. Actually, maybe she'd appreciate an "I'd like to have a long conversation in with you, what's a good time" sort of thing." Sergia would, but she knows some people hate that kind of advance notice more than they like getting to pick a convenient time.

"I won't hold you to fighting me tomorrow, if you want to go spend time talking to her. That way she can talk to you before the-" 

"-yeah, before her household go home on Monday, in case she wants to introduce you to anyone and get their thoughts, I think some folks leave pretty early on Monday because they're driving a long way!"

Lucia is such a terrible liar and Cináed is so used to smoothly covering for her. He can so calmly inhabit a world where nothing is happening Monday except people packing up and going home. 

"Just, you know, only if you're ready, it's a big conversation," Roger chimes in. "Don't go have it tomorrow unless you're really really ready. Don't let Luce rush you." 

"Thanks, all of you. I've learned a lot about being a squire from this conversation and I intend to use that information responsibly. If you wanted to tell me anything else, I would also be responsible with that information, but I'm not going to badger anyone more than they're comfortable with, or keep anyone up too late when there's lots to do tomorrow." That probably sounds ridiculous in the universe where there is no secret, but so have several earlier statements, and conveying that she takes promises of secrecy--hers and other people's--seriously is important. If they're not allowed to tell her anything then they won't and she respects that even if she is also deeply curious and frustrated.

Lucia just about vibrates with the suppressed desire to blurt out everything she knows. But Sergia is hinting that she knows there's a secret and wants to know it - she's not giving Lucia any reason to believe that she knows something about what the secret is. 

It is so not fair that Lucia has to keep secrets! Honesty and commitment to truth are some of her best traits! She will take this frustration out on her opponents' helmets tomorrow.

"Oh, wow, yeah, there is a lot to do tomorrow and it's nearly - god, it's two in the morning." Cináed has pulled his phone out to check. "I want to make sure the fire gets put out before we sleep - are any of you all staying up much later?" 

Nobody in the group wants to stay up much later, so Cináed kicks some dirt over the embers of the fire and they wander to bed by the pale silver moonlight. 

Sergia only manages to fall asleep at a reasonable speed because it's two in the morning and she's exhausted, and in the morning she too has plenty of emotions to take out on her opponents' helmets. 

And when the sun is setting and the awards are given out and the thrones are packed away, she goes and finds Sir Nicole and asks her if she has time for a long conversation.

Lucia spots Sergia, sees the direction she's moving, and gives her a little wave and a mouthed, "Good luck." She's honestly really hoping Sergia gets it - it'd be great to have someone else she can commiserate with about the perils of being (she feels like) a tiny baby in a giant ancient household. In neither Sevenroads nor Rosemary can someone swing a stick without hitting a peer. 

She gives them some space and goes to hit her pell on her own. 

Nicole officially has no particular plans except to wander over to the little merchants row - it's only two or three shops since it's only a small war - and perhaps buy something from the tavern, since a friend of hers is running it. She unofficially might have had other plans, but she doesn't show any of that on her face - just a small pleasant smile. (She doesn't have to fake that smile once she sees it's one of her favourite newer fighters.) 

"Of course. What's on your mind? Is it something we could talk about while meandering down to the merchants?"

She turns to gesture at a path that would take them the long way through the woods towards the "tavern" (really just a slightly bigger pavilion set up by a boy-scout cabin). On that route they can circle all the way around the battlefield and not be overheard, though she'll have to step carefully to avoid getting mud on the embroidered hem of her cotehardie. 

"If you want to come with, I'll buy you a drink."

"Sure, that works." Theoretically a large fraction of this conversation could be had in front of witnesses but it's nice not to have to.

Once they're a little ways off, she says the line she's been rehearsing all day. "I've been learning a lot from you at fighting practices and I admire your skills as both a fighter and a teacher, and I'm wondering if you'd be open to the prospect having me as a squire. I know that I don't know everything about what it would entail, and there are some things I'd want to discuss before finalizing anything, but that's the conversation I'd like to open." She decided against saying that she knew more than she was supposed to right off, because she doesn't want to come off like she thinks knowing too much is a reason Sir Nicole should say yes. She'll be open about it in a minute, but she'd want this even if there was no secret, so that's the world she's asking in.

"I'm glad you asked. You're a good student and you have the right attitude, so I'd been thinking about bringing it up, too."

It's a deliberately chosen answer; a way of reassuring Sergia that the question isn't unwelcome without fully committing to a positive response. Nicole's instinct is just to start quizzing Sergia, but long practice at courtesy has made it easier to tamp that instinct down. 

Nicole picks a nice wide path with fewer trees overhanging so they can enjoy the already-fading sunlight - it's only late afternoon, but it's early spring. Once they're in the woods, the noises of the post-court crowd chattering fade away, and they can hear one or two birds fluttering around in the bushes.

"I certainly have things to ask you too, but let's start with the things you wanted to discuss." Nicole could've guessed Sergia had been rehearsing that sentence even if it hadn't come out as a long complicated thing without a single nervous um or uh. If she's been rehearsing that, she's probably got a list of questions too, and Nicole wants to let her work through whatever she's holding in her head before she starts introducing new thoughts. "What's your most important question?" 

It's definitely a relief that Sir Nicole was thinking about it too. And that she was willing to say as much.

"Most of my questions are variations on the theme of 'what would our obligations be to each other'--how much time we'd be spending together, any rules you'd want me to start following, what things other than fighting prowess you'd want me to focus on learning, that sort of thing. Also I'd want to meet some of the members of your household who I haven't met yet."

She takes a deep breath and adds, "Also I want to know more about--the secret thing all the peers and dependents are involved in. I know I'm not supposed to know there even is a thing, but I do, and I'm pretty sure it's something I'll want to help with once I know what it is."

"The secret thing all the peers and dependents are involved in - so I take it you're not talking about things like chiv meetings?"

Nicole is perfectly unruffled, and much better than either Cináed or Lucia at keeping secrets. Her expression is a slight but polite confusion - as though she's certain Sergia is just mistaken about a perfectly ordinary sort of thing, like not realising that there's plenty of non-squires in the Kraken meetings. 

"What makes you think there's a secret?" 

"I don't mean the order meetings, no. I think there's a secret because people sneak off in small groups to "fight pickups" and sometimes come back from them with injuries you can't get from a piece of rattan. Because everyone had to clear off the archery range at Seven Pearls a few years ago because there was a "rabid possum" and animal control never showed up and instead a couple of Pelicans went that way and then it was clear again. Because way too many people have actual sharp steel weapons they keep in their cars and never actually put on where I can see them. Because I once saw a Laurel's cloak fall into a campfire and the fire turned green and the cloak was completely undamaged. Because of the conversations about authenticity where people who are generally pretty chill suddenly treat "would someone from the actual time and place notice this was weird" like a hard standard and then they get covid and quarantine for two weeks every time. Because the medical tent at Pennsic has equipment for blood transfusions and a dispenser of holy water. Because I once saw seven people come out of the same porta-john without anyone going in. Because of the way people act like if they mess anything up they or someone else will actually die for real."

Her voice has been getting harsher and quieter this whole time; by now it's barely above a whisper. "I think you're fighting a real war, a shadow war. I think the enemy isn't human. I think the people I know wouldn't be doing it if it wasn't right, if it wasn't important. So I want to know and I want to help."

"Very nicely done. Correct on almost all counts."

(Sometimes seven people being in one portajohn is a sex thing. But most of that was related to the secret. Sir Nicole makes a mental note as to places where information security failed, people to speak to - she'll have to find out who that Laurel was and have a stern word.) 

Sir Nicole du Vivier, Knight of Atlantia and heir to some tiny fraction of the holy magic of Joan of Arc, clicks her fingers and attracts the attention of an old, old power that listens and cares about the gravitas of who she is and the oaths she's sworn. It answers with a brilliant, shifting white light that plays gently around her palm and fractures into rainbows around her fingertips, and then she tips her hand to fling it at a small rock lying by the roadside and disintegrates it. A little hint of glittering glimmer remains in the air where the rock was. 

"So, yes, I will have to ask you to keep the magic and the demons secret, and even if you don't swear fealty you'll have to swear something to that effect."

She will give Sergia some time to process the obvious show of magic before she explains anything else, but that part is important and needs to be said upfront. 

She stares at the magic and re-evaluates what kind of world she's living in, then stares at the air and turns words over in her head. "I swear I will make no attempt to reveal the existence of magic or demons to someone who doesn't already know about them unless you or someone else you say can give me permission gives me permission or unless I am certain that not telling will get someone killed and there's no time to ask you. If you want there to be fewer exceptions than that I'd really like to know why it has to be secret first. I expect there's a very good reason but there are a bunch of different things it could be."

"No, that was well worded. It's easier to explain why the secret is important if you understand how magic works."

Nicole takes a second to collect her thoughts and figure out the correct order to explain everything in. It's a pretty good sign about Sergia that she immediately thought to swear something and didn't say anything stupid, like not giving herself an exit clause. People who swear stupid oaths tend to end up being oathbreakers and that's not a good way to have a successful magical career.

"So, you've noticed that chivalry and honour matter. You've also probably heard stories of objects like the holy grail, where you can't touch them or use them unless you're sufficiently pure of heart. When an old thing has power, it's typically because it accumulated power from the belief and good deeds and virtues of the people who held it and passed it down over the years. A sword used for brave deeds for decades or centuries by people who were brave and believed in the importance of courage - it'll acquire a little magic from the strength of all that courage. That's an oversimplification, but you're with me so far?" 

What a beautiful way for magic to work. "With you so far."

"So yes, we fight demons. And there's a lot of old artefacts that are very useful in fighting demons, and we'd like to use them. When you've got a holy grail type of thing, that only answers to the pure of heart, that's often relatively easy - most of the Order of the Pelican qualifies. When you've got an Excalibur type thing, a sword that can only be used by a true and legitimate king... well, we don't have a lot of legitimate firstborn sons of firstborn sons of Kings of England around, and we'd quite like to use as many of those artefacts as we can get our hands on, so we needed a way to convince the swords. Crown Tournament is, basically, our way of manufacturing as many people as possible who count - for magical purposes - as true kings. As long as we believe in the Crown and acknowledge them as worthy of loyalty and reverence, it works, and Crown Tournament winners tend to be able to pull swords out of stones. We've found a six month reign is about the minimum - outside the West - to get the relevant magic working. Still following?"

"Yes. Rapidly accumulating questions, but not ones that can't wait while I get the initial explanation in a sensible order." (Does the enemies being "demons" mean there are angels? Is any specific religion true? Is the West faster at getting kings because they were first, or what? Why are there that many swords in stones? Are there swords that can only be wielded by a legitimately elected president? Which answer to the previous question would be more fucked up?)

"Good. So now you can understand part of why this is all secret. If you walked in on day one thinking that you needed to respect the Crown in order to make a magic sword work, you'd fundamentally have a transactional relationship with the kingdom - you'd be forcing or faking those feelings, motivated by your fear of demons. We need to let people develop those feelings on their own, for real, and now your understanding of why it's important will hopefully strengthen your loyalty but won't ever be the original motivation for it. There's certain artefacts that will work for true and loyal warriors who are obedient to their liege lords, and if you do end up swearing fealty to me and thinking of me as legitimately your liege lord, they'll work for you. They'll hopefully keep working for you if you ever become a peer and swear fealty to the Crown." 

Nicole looks over at Sergia to check she's not looking too disturbed before adding, "And that brings us to the other reason this has to be secret. You're ready to hear something you might not like very much?" 

She's going to need to spend some time processing her emotions about fealty being magically real--in particular, it makes the question of how to deal with bad royals significantly more important--but that can wait for later, when she's alone with time to think. Knowing that some of the conclusions she could come to will result in magic powers is pressure enough without also being watched and under time pressure. And apparently there's bad news to deal with first. "Go ahead."

"It'd be really nice if demons were evil and we defeated them with the power of goodness and friendship. But the good magical artefacts we use and the evil demons aren't fundamentally different types of things, though many of us like to day-to-day maintain suspension of disbelief about that - and you probably should too. They're all just old things that gained power through people really really feeling strongly about the moral codes they represent for a really long time. Sometimes a demon is sort of like.... a ghost from the twelfth century that really really believes usury is evil and wants to bomb Bank of America about it. And sometimes we defeat those demons with magic artefacts that are powered by virtues like obedience and chastity and loyalty, because they were empowered by some medieval church that felt those things were really important and passed them down between monks."

Nicole skirts delicately around the edge of a larger churned-up area of mud, lifting layers of fancy French velvet with a practised twist of the wrist.

"You can game it to an extent, as we've done with Crown, but you can't fake it. If we didn't feel real, legitimate reverence for our Crowns then we'd lose every Excalibur-type artefact that we have, and a lot of people would probably get eaten by demons. You have to be a very particular sort of person to strike the balance we strike, and qualify as a good person by both medieval moral codes and modern moral codes. Tell the general public that magic is powered by chivalry and honour, and not the modern romanticisation of it but actual ancient and medieval moral codes, and they'll turn into a bunch of fascists. The SCA maintains a sort of.... quarantine zone for medieval moral codes so the rest of the world can make social and moral progress. And in a few centuries, we'll hopefully have artefacts that are powered by modern values like democracy and equality, but they still need a few centuries to slowly accumulate power."

Ah. Yeah. That's gonna take some thinking. Sergia loves the SCA, loves having royalty and peers to look up to as shining examples of virtue and achievement, but she's also a proud American feminist with bordering on religious feelings about the Bill of Rights. 

"That's a very good reason for the secrecy and I will take it appropriately seriously. Um, and I'm going to need to sit down and think about all of that for a while later, and--figure out what my principles are. And I want to warn you that there's a chance it will all come crashing down in my head and I'll never be able to use magic. I don't think that's very likely but if I'm not prepared for the possibility I won't be able to think straight about it. Obviously if that happens and you decide not to give me a belt because of it I won't hold it against you."

"I know you will take it appropriately seriously, or I wouldn't have told you. Also we do have someone with the ability to edit memories, which you can ask for voluntarily if you don't feel able to handle this. I strongly recommend not being someone who needs to have memories removed involuntarily, and I don't think you will be."

They are almost rounding the corner where the tavern will come into sight in the distance. Sir Nicole deliberately slows her footsteps and dawdles so that they'll have a little longer in the woods. If Sergia seems like she needs more time, she can always turn around and wander in the opposite direction.

"But yes, figuring out your principles is the right approach. We've got plenty of artefacts that care about faithfulness and loyalty but don't care at all about being brave or generous, and vice versa, plenty that require courage and charity but don't require honesty or obedience. Figure out what you can genuinely feel, what you can get on board with enough to game, and what you can't do at all. If there's something you can't do at all because it's fundamentally opposite to your nature, sometimes you're still useful because some artefacts are fooled by virtue relative to the surroundings - we had a really hard time with some of the chastity-powered stuff until we realised that almost any demisexual we pick off the street counts as chaste-by-comparison if they camp close to people who host orgies every night." She says this perfectly matter-of-factly, entirely detached from the subject matter. Sergia may, or may not, figure out on her own time why nobody's ever seen Nicole with a partner. Nicole's used to the supreme awkwardness of that conversation by now, but she doesn't need to put Sergia through it by saying anything too explicitly.

"None of us are the model of a good tenth-century Catholic peasant and none of us want to be. We keep the secret because we don't need this kind of magic in the hands of people who would want to bring back the bad parts of that era. You're not bad or wrong if you can't use every artefact. Figure out what you think you can use and we'll go from there."

"That makes sense. I'll figure it out." She believes that a lot of cultures have things worth learning from. "It's not just medieval Europe, right? There are, like, katanas that can only be wielded by true samurai and spells that only work for good Confucians and so on?" She usually wears Greek more for the convenient rectangles than because Athens was the cradle of democracy but it would be really cool if there was ancient Athenian magic that ran off Aristotelian conceptions of virtue or something.

"Yes, there are katanas that can only be wielded by true samurai. You don't have to have a Japanese persona to convince those swords you're a samurai, but the closer you are to the type of person it's expecting the better, so medieval Japanese garb certainly doesn't hurt and neither does speaking Japanese. No standalone spells that work without possessing an artefact of some kind, but there's Chinese artefacts too. All the major world religions work too, before you ask. There's some cultures we don't have many personas from because we've been trying to hand their artefacts back to them - there's a lot of different groups all over the world that do this kind of thing."

"And some cultures we'd like more personas from, but usually people have already settled on something by the time we tell them the secret and not everyone can conveniently switch their emotions over to be passionate about the cultures we're most in need of. In Atlantia we still possess far more of the relics of lost Atlantis than we can use, because for some of them we haven't been able to figure out someone they'll answer to."

"Wait, Atlantis was real? That's so cool! Kind of messed up, if it actually sank, but also cool. How much do we know about their culture, do we have anything they wrote or is it all guesswork from 'hand around an artifact and see if it lights up' or what?"

"Yes. We went down there in a submarine. The myth says they were cast beneath the sea by the gods for their hubris. I'd prefer to phrase it as an evil tectonic demon got mad about insufficient quantities of the virtue of humility and their guardians didn't manage to defeat that demon before it successfully submerged the island. The same kind of tsunamis would fairly regularly come for New York, Boston, San Francisco or DC if it weren't for the West, the East and Atlantia fairly regularly sending kill teams after those demons."

There's a note of emotion in her voice that rarely shows through her polished, poised politeness - an anger old and constant enough to have turned from fire to cold steel. Humility isn't one of the virtues Sir Nicole needs to operate any of the artefacts she works with - and that's a deliberate choice she's made. She loves that the modern world, with all its hubris and ambition, gets to try and do things like cure cancer or run four-minute miles or put people on the moon. If ancient powers want to kill her for that, well, that's what she has a sword for.

She'd die to protect the SCA's secret before she let demons intimidate the East Coast out of betting on wild startup ideas, challenging established scientists about whether their papers replicate, posting their selfies with flirty captions, running for office, letting kids confidently declare that they'll be singer-songwriter-astronauts when they grow up... 

Nicole tells herself to cut it out after only a brief indulgence in distraction, her usual slight smile never wavering from her face - though for a few moments there it didn't reach her eyes. Plenty of time to get into all that later. 

"Anyway. Almost nothing they wrote survives. Ancient Greek personas, and other ancient Mediterranean seafaring cultures, have some success with their artefacts. We've figured out some things by magical trial and error and other things with standard archaeology methods. If you're interested, you might very well be the sort of person who can make some Atlantis things work."

It's a sobering realization, that the problem exists on the scale of city-destroying tsunamis. She'd be terrified, if she wasn't learning about it in the context of being part of an organization of thousands of people fighting against it together. Instead she's skipped right to thinking that this is her country and she's not going to let anything fuck with it.

"I look forward to finding out."

As they walk around the next bend in the path, the tavern becomes visible some two hundred metres away across a coldly sunny green field. 

The permanent Scout cabin is a simple log longhouse type of construction, with a set of double doors tied open on the centre of the long side. On either side of the doors an open-sided dayshade has been set up, with a scattering of camp chairs and folding tables set atop richly coloured rugs and picnic blankets. A tiny street of merchants' pavilions extends off to the left. 

The place is bright with Atlantians in splendid brocade and fluttering cloaks and gauzy veils, chattering and relaxing and laughing. Some of them are re-enactors who will miss their friends until the next event, and some of them will fight a demon tomorrow and maybe die, but many of both groups have that unique frantically merry air of warriors who only have tonight to drink together before parting ways again. In one corner two bards are drumming and playing the sort of cheerful-despite-the-minor-key dancing flute tune that strikes the modern ear as slightly strange and slightly medieval. A few nobles have spontaneously started dancing together on the lawn. A group of younger fighters are arm-wrestling each other on a corner table while others stand around them cheering and teasing. The Dream is thick in the air.

Nicole gestures towards the tavern. "If you want to ask me questions, I'm happy to linger, but I want to let you figure out your stance on demonslaying and magic before we even start talking about whether you want to be specifically my squire. If you need some time and space to process and think, let's get you a snack and a Diet Coke and talk again tomorrow?"

Nicole is only vaguely aware of Sergia's social circles but she knows the tavern will have at least somebody like Lucia or Cináed or Erik who can, if Sergia turns out to not be able to happily chatter about her day to the fellow taverngoers right now, take her aside for a gigantic hug and help her get back to her camp. She isn't quite the right person for that right now - she thinks Sergia will need someone she knows exactly where she stands with. 

"I still have a bunch of questions about how the magic works, but I think I know everything I really need to know right now. So, snack and a coke and having a think and then asking all the practical questions tomorrow morning, how about."

There's so many questions Sergia hasn't asked. Like how likely it is that she'll die, or whether they use their memory-erasing magic to cover up the number of medieval re-enactors who die in battle, or whether she's in danger now that she knows, or what happens to her if she fails to be able to use any artefacts at all. Sensible questions that, by many metrics, ought to be the first ones she asks. Instead, she asked about multiculturalism and the history of Atlantis, which... sounds a lot less like practical concerns and more like a naturally irrepressible curiosity. 

Nicole is quietly proud. (Of herself, as much as of Sergia; it's the first time she's tried to lick someone and she feels like she picked well.) 

"Snack and a Coke it is. By the way, regarding what you swore earlier, you always have my permission to do anything the Crown of Atlantia tells you to do, including revealing secrets, unless you feel like they are asking you to betray your honour. You mostly did great on the wording, but I want to make sure I don't put you in the position of being unable to do something Crown asks."

Before they get too close to the tavern, Nicole changes the subject and asks pleasant ordinary questions about how Sergia's day went. 

The tavern is run by a married couple, one of whom brews in the SCA and the other of whom bartends as a mundane job. They sell Nicole and Sergia a Pepsi for Sergia (they don't have Coke), a green tea for Nicole, and something they're calling a "fighter candy special sandwich" - which turns out to involve ham and some kind of citrusy chutney and a frankly unreasonable quantity of pickles.

Cináed is there, trying to prevent Thorsteinn and Roger getting into too much mischief. Aleksei is sitting close to the bards and listening intently. 

She can answer pleasant ordinary questions! More on autopilot than she usually is, but it's only noticeable if you know her well or know what to look for. She drinks her coke and chows down on pickles and looks around at the people she's known for most of a year and the people she met today. Some of them are obviously involved, though she's not clear what exactly the artists do. Some of them are plainly just having a fun weekend with no idea that anything other than social drama hides below the surface. It's kind of amazing, when she thinks about it, that the same organization can fight a war and be a source of so much fun and joy and friendship and learning. It says something good about magic, she thinks, and something good about people.

(She appreciates Sir Nicole's permission to do anything the Crown tells her, and her general concern for preventing Sergia from getting caught between two oaths. Being a person it's safe to swear things to on short notice is part of what will make her such a good knight to squire to.)

And when she's done with the delicious pickle sandwich and the Pepsi and made arrangements to meet with Sir Nicole tomorrow morning, she goes back to the Barony campsite and pulls her chair into her tent and sits down to write. With a pen and the backs of a series of voided checks and her cuirass as a lap desk, because she hadn't realized she was going to need to take notes at this event.

Thing number one that she wasn't dealing with while anyone was watching and is now dealing with: she might die. Well, she's definitely going to die, the only question is how soon and of what. The death rate at various levels of expertise is definitely something to ask about; she knows people who have been in the Society for decades but it's possible that new people die a lot and then if you don't die for long enough you get good. She doesn't think newer people explicitly get used as cannon fodder but keeping someone else alive in a fight is hard.

She spends a little while turning the concept of having a short life expectancy over in her mind. She doesn't like it, but she's apparently not going to freak out about it even when she specifically gives herself the opportunity. Maybe it's because she's a teenager and thinks she's immortal. Maybe it's because apparently magic and ghosts are real and that makes her, if not a believer, at least open to the possibility that death isn't the end. But a lot of it is because dying for something worth dying for doesn't feel like losing. Better to live to a hundred, though that comes at the cost of dying full of tubes in a hospital instead of quickly on the field of battle. But it's not the worst, if she dies for something she cares about. When she was a little kid she had thought about being a firefighter or a soldier (before she had her current understanding of all the problems with the US military) in between wanting to be an archaeologist or more recently a lawyer. Choosing a dangerous job because you think it's worth doing is something people do, she's doing it, so be it.

Second thing to maybe freak out about: the memory wiping. Wiping other people's memories is definitely a "doing evil for the greater good" kind of situation, and she generally hates those. But what's the alternative? Letting society collapse into a dozen simultaneous religious wars? It feels childish to object to something when she doesn't know what should be done instead. It's wrong to not speak up against something bad just because you're worried about being childish, but "you must have some kind of better idea" seems like a reasonable standard. She resolves to ask about how often people's memories get wiped without their consent. If ten people a year in the whole country learn something they shouldn't, and five of them join the fight and two consent to a memory wipe and two swear never to speak of it and the tenth is forced to forget, that's not a priority to do anything about. If people are getting their brains turned to swiss cheese every day, maybe it is. She'll be on the lookout for opportunities to improve on the status quo and be very careful to keep the secret. (Ugh, she's going to have to learn to lie even though it's hard and sucks.)

. . . Has her memory ever been wiped? She doesn't have anywhere near a good enough memory to check her entire life history for gaps, let alone inconsistencies where a false memory was added to cover a missing one. Also she feels like maybe she should decide whether reducing the amount of memory-wiping is a priority before finding out whether it's happened to her, because that's not what would make it important.

Potential delayed freakout number three: how all of this is going to interact with her mundane life.

Her parents both definitely know, which is amazing because lying to them would suck massive balls. She'll see them at Pennsic (what is Pennsic, when it isn't being the crowning glory of summer vacation?) and she'll tell them then, to their faces, and Mom will say she's proud and try not to cry and Dad will hug her until his forge-strengthened arms nearly crush her and won't say anything, and it'll be alright. 

She'll keep her GPA up . . . somehow. There are Peers who are surgeons, for goodness' sake, she can find time to do her homework. She'll ask how many additional hours a month people usually start spending on SCA stuff when they start fighting demons. And whether it screws everything up if you take a week off for finals or a year off because you have a baby or something. (Her position on kids was previously "maybe someday" and is now "maybe someday, if I conclude this is a good world to bring children into".) Relatedly, is the demon-fighting life something people retire from? Are the knights who fight seventy fights for their seventieth birthdays still going into combat? What happens if someone gets permanently injured (or is there healing magic)? What if someone has a crisis of conscience and comes out with a completely different set of virtues? Or no magically useful virtues? . . . Do people who get R&D'd get memory-wiped? See previous argument about that being fucked up. Also, wow, there's going to be an entire new layer of social drama to stay on top of, isn't there. Terrible. But also a side issue.

That's it for things she was freaking out about. It is now time to move on to: questions about the nature of the universe! This would probably be a freakout if she was more of a scientist type, but she frankly is not and if someone is going to find out what fundamental particles demons are made of it's not going to be her.

For this section her notes are basically just a list of questions.

In more detail, where do demons come from?

Does killing a particular demon get rid of it forever, or do they respawn?

Are we winning or are they?

Is there a way to prevent demons from forming?

Is there a way to detect demons at a distance? What fraction of fights are "SCAdians go hunting" vs "SCAdians get ambushed" vs "someone else gets ambushed and SCAdians rush to the rescue"?

How many people do demons kill a year?

Is there a long-term plan for making demons less of an issue? Would humanity coming to some kind of final consensus on the nature of virtue and staying that way for centuries basically solve it, or is it even more impossible than that?

Are demons all based on things people have at some point conceived of as virtues, or are there demons of vice?

Are the battle lines purely "all humans vs all nonhumans" or are there good demons? Do humans ever disagree on whether a particular demon has a point and end up fighting each other about it?!

Can the demons talk? Can they understand the concept of a truce? Can they ever be talked into not doing the thing they were planning to do? Do they work together? Do they learn? Are they smart enough to lie? Can they impersonate humans? What are their capabilities in general?

Do demons also use artifacts, or do they have inherent magic, or do they just bite people and stuff?

Does the SCA know anything other people don't about what happens when you die? Did the thing about usury ghosts mean all demons are dead people, or just some? Are demons conscious?

Where do swords in stones and whatnot come from? Is it all extant historical stuff or can you deliberately make a sword magic and shove it into a stone so someone else can pull it out? Are there a bunch of archaeologists in on the conspiracy passing us swords?

More generally, what do Laurels and Pelicans do? 

Do archers have magic bows, or magic arrows, or a mix of both? Are there magic siege weapons? Are there magic cannons? Do symbolically important places matter, e.g. is the Tower of London demon-proof or conversely ultra-haunted?

If someone can't make it to a particular fight, can someone else temporarily use their items, or do they bond to a person? If someone dies can their items be passed on?

Okay, that was like half questions about the nature of reality and half strategic speculation, but she is who she is.

Is that everything before she starts listing every virtue she can think of and whether she believes she can cultivate them? . . . No, she needs to make sure someone will tell her parents the truth about it if she dies in battle before Pennsic. Lucia would be the easiest person to ask but she doesn't want to stick Lucia with that so she'll ask Sir Nicole.

Also she should think about fealty separately from the rest of it, because apparently her capacity for fealty-related emotions is important for other people's magic and not just her own. So, can she feel genuine fealty and reverence for the crowns of Atlantia and the men and women who wear them?

In the typical case, yes, absolutely. The vast majority of royals she's known, including the current ones, are good people: honorable and courteous, dedicated to the Dream and their own contributions to it, willing to work hard so everyone else can have a good time. Knowing they put their lives on the line to protect humanity only increases her respect. But occasionally one or both royals is just a total jerk.

Previously Sergia's response to that was to just not interact with the reign much--do retaining for the Baron and Baroness instead, go to court but don't get invested, follow them into battle because that's what you do. Maybe that's fine? Plenty of medieval monarchs were kind of awful, and people followed them into battle because that's what you did. There's that saying she's heard a few times, "I swear fealty to the crown, not the head under it", and if that attitude works then she's fine. People end their oaths with "as far as honor shall allow" or similar so they can't be stuck being complicit in something shitty, and generally nobody tries to make them be complicit in anything shitty and it all works even when someone thinks a given set of royals suck. And there'll still be the respect for any given person's willingness to fight demons, that will help a lot.

At that point the only thing to worry about is "what if the king is a bad field commander and following his orders will get a bunch of people killed by demons", and she has a long time before she's good enough to reasonably second-guess anyone there, and probably enough people have thought about that problem that there's a solution for it. So that is, if not definitely fine, at least something she doesn't have to solve on her own tonight.

Sergia takes a moment to feel patriotic about Atlantia, and happy about how awesome the current King and Queen and Sir Nicole are, and excited about being able to serve her kingdom, before moving on.

Okay, now it's time to start listing historical virtues. She'll just write down as many as she can think of first and then go over them. If she had her phone she could pull up chivalric manuals and stuff but she likes being unable to check her email at camping events.

Honor/keeping promises

Honesty

Courage

Reliability/Trustworthiness

Loyalty/friendship

Fealty

Patriotism

Prowess

Kindness

Justice

Mercy

Temperance

Prudence

Fortitude

Faith

Hope

Charity

Franchise 

Filial piety

Virtus

Disciplina

Arete

Courtesy

Grace/beauty

Obedience

Chastity

Poverty

Humility

Religious conviction

Generosity/largesse

Noblesse

Making good art

Patience

Being a good orator?

Tactics skill?

Wisdom/thoughtfulness

Masculinity 

Femininity 

Volunteerism 

Reason

It's going to be embarrassing when a bunch of these get a "what, no, magic doesn't think that's a virtue", but it's more important not to leave anything out, especially since apparently nobody knows what a lot of the Atlantis things want. Also a lot of these have a bunch of different flavors from different cultures but for now she's just going to use the concepts in her own head and refine them later.

So, which of these does she want to dedicate herself to? She probably shouldn't start with more than one or two at once, but she should bring a bunch of options because it's going to depend on what artifacts like her. 

Honor is a yes. Reliability is a yes. Prowess is a yes. The friendship/loyalty/fealty/patriotism cluster is a yes, though she's not sure if those tend to all go together or if you need to focus on at most one in case they get in each other's way.

Honesty . . . right after joining a conspiracy is a bad time to dedicate herself to honesty, but ask her again in three months.

Similarly, mercy would be a weird virtue to start caring about while joining a paramilitary force. Also a lot of rhetoric around mercy comes off as philosophically confused.

Courage: She's no coward but there are so many brave people around that it'd be weird if that was the right thing for her to focus on. That's actually kind of a problem with a lot of these, her good qualities are very normal good qualities and it's very possible all the artifacts she could use are already taken. Well, that's what cultural specialization is for. She likes the Roman conception of virtus--part courage and part initiative and part eagerness and part ambition and part determination--and disciplina, the prudence that prevents virtus from turning into impulsive recklessness. 

Justice: either a definite yes or a definite no depending on whether there are any artifacts whose idea of justice matches up with hers. And hers is tied up with her thoughts on the purpose of law and the duty of a government to its people and general American-ness in a way that might make it not workable.

Temperance: depends what's meant by it. It would be a bit sad to never be able to have a drink at a party, but totally worth it. Not gambling is easy, giving up chocolate would suck. Worth considering but not a first pick.

Prudence: if there are available artifacts that run on prudence that would be a pretty amazing life hack? Getting magic from making sensible decisions would be awesome. But is she prudent enough? Being happy with her current life decisions makes this another "very yes or very no".

Fortitude: strictly less appealing than virtus, as things that might be naively translated as "courage" go. Too much patiently enduring hardship, not enough forging forth to kick butt. Fine if there's nothing better available.

Faith: Only if faith in her friends counts. If there's a higher power, it doesn't seem very helpful. Maybe when she gets her questions about the nature of magic answered it'll turn out there's something she can have faith in.

Hope: again, she's not christian enough for the christian version. She can totally do the "never giving up on the possibility of a better world" kind, though.

Charity, and also generosity and largesse and poverty: Sergia has never been a non-student adult with a full time job and a budget and thinks she should try that before committing to a virtue based around her relationship to material goods. 

Franchise: she has read more words about franchise than 99% of modern people but probably only about 1% of what she would need to read to understand it. 

Filial piety: very possible in theory, but it's hard to be meaningfully filial from two states over and also this is the part of her life where she's moved out and gaining independence and stuff and focusing on filial piety is the wrong mindset for that.

Obedience is a similar situation: it's not that she wouldn't be able to take the required actions, but cultivating a mindset of obedience as distinct from loyalty would make her less the person she wants to be.

Arete: she's not well-rounded enough but if arts and sciences turns out to be useful for fighting demons maybe she'll work on that.

Courtesy and Grace: Sergia is honestly quite bad at these. She can remember people's titles and when to bow and stuff but she's not elegant the way Roses are elegant.

Chastity: she's technically a virgin, and apparently the Pennsic orgies mean her couple of experimental high school makeouts at parties and under bleachers won't disqualify her, but--she'd like to fall in love someday, and kiss the person she loves, and have sex, and she doesn't want to close off the option when there are so many guys out there she hasn't met.

Humility: hahahaha no. Sergia is pretty sure you can't use humility magic if you've been dreaming of being a Peer for over a decade and firmly believe you have what it takes to get there someday. Also the concept of humility is just not appealing at all.

Really, most of rest of the list at this point is stuff that doesn't resonate with her very much, except for Reason and Volunteerism and maybe Wisdom. Reason might work well with her Greek persona, if there's a Greek (or Atlantean!) artifact that wants her to be a philosopher and have conversations about the nature of law and the purpose of government and the meaning of virtue in between demon fights.

In conclusion: she's most interested in looking for artifacts that work off honor, reliability, prowess, any of the loyalty to a person or group variants, virtus, disciplina, courage, reason, or any weird Atlantis artifacts that seem to like the cut of her jib for unclear reasons.

She folds up her notes and hides them at the bottom of her handbag. Packs up everything she can tonight to make her life easier tomorrow. And then she sleeps again, and dreams of shining swords, and in the morning she has to read over her notes again to make sure they're real.

There's a feeling she gets sometimes, most often at Pennsic but occasionally at other events, that this is the real and important thing and the rest of the world is just a game you have to play to get money for the things you want in real life. She has class tomorrow, and she knows that while she's there it will seem important, but right now class feels like a dream and she is awake and has no time for dreams.

She does have time for breakfast. Whatever she does today, she'll do it better well-fed and caffeinated.

It is Roger's turn to do breakfast in the morning. He is woken by his phone (set to vibrate) going off under his pillow. He'll go back to sleep if he doesn't get moving fairly immediately - Roger isn't a morning person at all - but he planned for this last night; there's a can of the white sugarfree Monster Energy balanced delicately on top of his armour bag, poised to fall on his head if he tries moving around too much without remembering it. He grabs it and chugs the entire thing without really taking a breath.

Fifteen minutes later he's feeling like a human being who can have thoughts and feelings other than murderous intent towards everyone who asked him to wake up at this hour. He rolls out of bed, pulls on his longest tunic - it'd be normal and acceptable to wear mundane clothes on pack out day but if he wears the comfy linen tunic then he doesn't have to wear pants - and goes to get started on making bacon and coffee for everyone.

Half an hour after that, the smells of coffee and bacon start drawing the rest of the camp from their beds. Cináed offers to help in the kitchen, and before long there's toast and eggs and tea being dumped into metallic trays and put out onto folding tables.

Lucia noticed Sergia's absence from the various parties and gatherings and campfire bardic circles last night, and worried that she might have had bad news from her conversation with Nicole, or might have not reacted well to the secret and - well, Lucia tries not to think about that at all, it's one of the things she's been told not to think about but she's allowed to worry. And maybe Nicole's just a very reserved, very private, very independent person who doesn't want squires. And maybe Lucia's just feeling protective of someone she instinctively sees as a comrade even among comrades.

As the camp is waking up, Lucia goes and hovers awkwardly near Sergia's tent doors. "There's coffee ready if you want it," she says through the door, in a voice just loud enough to be clearly understood if Sergia is half awake but quiet enough to hopefully not wake her if she's deep asleep. 

"Yes I do!" She pops out of the tent in a t-shirt and jeans with her hair in a ponytail and looks around for people she shouldn't say stuff in front of. Seeing none:

"I learned a lot yesterday evening. I'm excited and nervous and meeting up with Sir Nicole in half an hour to ask her about fifty more questions."

"Oh! So - did she say yes? Did you say yes? Are you coming along tonight? Are they - Oh, I should let you get bacon before I pester you about this."

Lucia makes the awkward open-arm gesture that indicates she's offering a hug but isn't going to force it, letting Sergia step into it if she wants it and ignore it if she doesn't.

"Uh, there are probably newbies around but if you want to chat we can do it in the kitchen tent, Cináed and Roger are good at guarding it." 

Hug! "She said she'd been thinking of asking me! I don't know if I'll be able to make it to tonight logistics-wise but I'd like to? Let's go hang out in the kitchen tent for sure, I ate like half a normal dinner last night and then lost the plot for a while and I want bacon."

"Oh that is so good!"

Lucia walks with Sergia to the kitchen and has a quiet word with Roger while Sergia is getting herself food and drink. She makes sure Roger knows that if the newbies try to enter the kitchen tent, they should be informed that Lucia and Sergia have the breakfast cleanup handled and don't need more cooks spoiling the broth.

There is plenty of bacon and coffee and eggs and toast and some fried mushrooms and some leftover donuts from someone's last town run.

"I hope we didn't keep you up if you were trying to sleep last night, we were kind of getting into it with Atlantian Steel." 

"I slept alright once I managed to chill out enough, I just needed to take a lot of notes first--I'm worried if we get into it I'm going to just end up asking you the giant pile of questions I was planning on asking Sir Nicole, and maybe you don't want to deal with being the exposition machine right now? Tell me what you're up for and I can dial it back as appropriate. But I'm excited and nervous and excited!"

"Ah, so - something you should probably know about me sort of immediately is I'm actually the opposite of the right person for some sorts of questions. I, um, this is going to sound strange but uh - I have a naive and unspoiled sort of adoration for the world and faith in its beauty which counts as innocence and purity. Sometimes I kind of figure people aren't telling me everything and - yeah, not the right person. But I'm helping slay a dragon tonight!" 

(Roger is guarding the kitchen tent. It is very easy to lure the newbies away from it, because he is giving them bacon.)

"Oh gosh, that's really powerful of you, I would go nuts with curiosity. Also it sounds kind of dangerous? Like, if any of the stuff you don't know is strategically relevant or you learn something you shouldn't and it messes with your magic. I assume you have contingency plans for that, though?"

"Uh, I'm reliably informed that it is super dangerous and I'm really crazy for doing it. I guess maybe my household have a contingency plan? I trust them." 

"Well, if your knight says you're allowed I'm not going to second-guess him." She might inquire into the contingency plans and make sure she's as prepared as possible to protect Lucia, because only Sergia is allowed to take stupid risks and nobody else that's what friends are for. "Anyway, can you tell me what getting your first artifact was like? I'm imagining, like, picking up a bunch of items one at a time and seeing which one feels right or glows or something but that's just a wild guess from reading too many fantasy books as a kid."

"So for me it was more like... we discussed a range of possible options and thoughts, and once everyone was convinced the idea they had for me was going to work for me, we went out to this mountain and did a quest and I got the thing from a cave. Like they knew it was there before, but I guess they didn't do the quest for it until they thought someone could use it. But you probably won't have to do that?"

"That sounds so cool but yeah, I'm kind of hoping I have something in time for the fight today."

"Sometimes someone will give you one of theirs. Because if you've got something that was a gift from someone you care about, it'll mean more to you, and they'll be better able to teach you how to work with it. And sometimes you kinda get assigned something because it's recently ownerless and we need it on the field."

"We do do the thing where you touch lots of objects and see if any are shiny, but - that's the collection of objects that aren't currently being used. And usually there is a reason nobody is using them yet - I mean, we really kind of put everything to use that we can put to use."

Nod. "Presumably it's better to eventually be able to use something nobody else was using because that increases the total amount of stuff in use but starting out with a gift makes sense. How much of what we have is weapons people fight with directly versus other things?"

"Weapons are the most obvious but honestly usually the least interesting. It doesn't take that much to get a sword over the threshold where you can at least hurt a monster with it - I'm like the third person to own mine, it got forged by a Laurel with a magic anvil like twenty years ago and my knight gave it to me and that's enough of a lineage that I can hurt things, and that's enough for me." 

"Let's see... in terms of the real power sources, I've got my cloak and my shield, Roger has some saintly martyr relic type stuff, Cináed has a magic sewing needle and a pretty serious sword and a banner... but there's a little magic in all the things that were passed down to us, like my helmet is extra protective because my knight's knight made it for me. You still have the newcomer token you were given at your first ever event, right?" 

Sergia smiles nostalgically. "My first ever event I was too small to know what objects were, but I still have the mug I got at the first event where I realized I could walk up and get one, yeah." She doesn't actually remember getting it but has been reliably informed that she said 'thank you your maggie' and that it was adorable, and she has a lot of fond memories of using it at feasts over the years. "Does that make it a tiny bit magic? Do all newcomer tokens do the same thing?"

"Yeah, they're luck tokens. We give all the newcomers luck tokens because it makes it a lot easier for them to avoid stumbling across things they shouldn't, like, we don't want them stumbling into a faerie ring in the dark while they're drunk or something. Your mug is probably turning everything you drink from it into a luck potion, just - an incredibly mild and weak one. It'll get stronger if you pass it on to someone, and stronger again if they treasure it for decades and pass it down again."

"Almost all magic stuff is mostly just - really good at being stuff. Like Tolkien's elven craft. My shield doesn't let me throw fireballs or anything, it's just a really good shield that deflects evil real well. I don't know what Sir Nicole showed you but she's - on the spectrum from a sword of magical sharpness to a magic ring that lets you set stuff on fire with your mind, she's unusually far on the fireball end."

"That makes sense. And something you said earlier made it sound like demons can only be hurt by magic weapons, so a magic sword is more useful than a regular gun and a very magic sword is more useful than a slightly magic one?"

"Yeah, there's a lot of monsters that are straight up immune to non-magical attacks. And the problem with a magic gun, even if you had one, is there's absolutely no way you are going to have a supply of magic bullets and even if you did, it would last you one fight and you'd be done. Some of our archers get away with this by having archery related things that are so obscenely powerful that they can put a bit of magic into non-magical ammunition, but that works because archery is like sixty thousand years old. And some of them have very very old arrowheads and will use them on things that really, really need shooting from a distance and then we'll try to retrieve and repair the arrow after. I've seen a twenty thousand year old arrowhead used once."

"Woah. That's so much responsibility. Did they get the twenty thousand year old arrowhead back alright?"

She almost asks 'is there a problem where our supply of ranged firepower is diminishing faster than we can replace it' but keeps her mouth shut because it might be the sort of question Lucia is not supposed to think about.

"Um, I was sort of distracted at the time but I'm pretty sure they did."

Lucia finishes scarfing down her breakfast and starts tidying and washing up. 

"I don't know how important this is for other people, but for me an important thing is to think about everything in more... everyday terms? Like yes, sure, I got the explanation for how it works and why we're doing it, I'm sure that what we are actually doing tonight is using the magical power of chivalry gimmicks to defeat a sort of really old ghost demon thing that is powered by medieval church vices or something, but I don't feel good about that framing. I'm a squire who is going to go slay a dragon because my Crown gave this quest to my knight and I'm in fealty and helping him slay dragons is the sort of thing good squires do. And I'm not carrying artefacts that work using some sort of arcane spirit-realm time-accumulating magic I don't understand, I'm wearing a cloak that was given to me by my Crown, and bearing a shield I won on an honourable quest. I have the whole demons thing written down in a notebook, I know enough about it to explain it to the newbies who always understandably want to know, but.... it's so much less good for me."

"I don't think that's how my brain works? I'm definitely going to keep an eye on my mental health over the next couple months and make sure I end up with a mindset that's sustainable in the long run but I don't think that in particular is the way to go for me. So far I've been thinking of it as sort of, there's a problem, I'm going to work together with my people to fix the problem, our moral principles and relationships and shared history are part of what makes us strong enough to do it and some of that is the regular way and some of it is more direct. But I'm happy to use your way of framing it while I'm talking to you if it helps you."

"I'd definitely appreciate you using that framing for me - I mean, I think that is one of the things people around me do to help protect the purity thing. So I don't have a good sense of whether it's really vital for magic or if it's just vital for my magic, and me being a hopeless romantic - like, in the Arthurian romance sense not in the Twilight sense, I know you know what I mean."

"Yeah, I get you. It's a beautiful way to see it."

Lucia finishes tidying up her own dishes and starts washing up some of the cooking pans and spatulas in the 'sink', which is actually a makeshift plastic bucket hooked up to a hose and suspended over a big hole in the ground. There's a big pile of dirt in the ground behind it, ready to refill the hole once the crew packs down their kitchen tent. The whole space smells slightly musty - old canvas and dirt and a hint of smoke underlying the fresher, more pleasant smells of bacon and coffee - and the rough metal shelves around the one half of the canvas pavilion are piled untidily with ziploc bags and rusty spare parts and filthy greaserags. The other half of the shelves are Cináed's domain, and are neatly arranged with tupperware boxes and totes in alternating blue and white and yellow.

"So, erm, I'm really sorry for not telling you about all this before? I'm not sorry in the sense that I was wrong, I was keeping an oath, but I'm sorry in the sense that I wish I didn't have to and I'm going to keep trying to convince people to let me tell them sooner the next time we have someone who is obviously clued in and just - ought to know already." 

"Thanks," says Sergia as she does her own washing up. "You definitely didn't do anything wrong and I appreciate you arguing for me to get to know sooner. It's going to be nice being able to be more candid with each other." Though apparently not completely candid because Lucia's magic runs on scary mental gymnastics. "It's about time for me to go talk to Sir Nicole, but with luck I'll see you this evening and if not I'll see you at practice."

Sergia heads over to the Rosemary camp; if Sir Nicole isn't visible from the gate she'll catch the eye of whoever is and ask to come in. It's an effort not to pull her notes out of her pocket and read over them again.

One of Nicole's campmates greets Sergia enthusiastically and shows her through to the common tent, which is a nice canvas pavilion with banners draped around the edges and a richly painted ceiling. In one corner two Roses are having an animated discussion of a piece of Elizabethan needlework over thin pancakes stuffed with strawberries and raspberries and chocolate sauce. 

Nicole is perched on a nice wooden folding bench in the corner, drinking green tea with one hand and looking at her phone with the other. She's in modern clothes for packout day but still somehow looks like a duchess; a dark ruffled blouse, silk scarf tied in a perfectly neat knot, and a flowing patterned floral skirt tied with an elegant white ribbon as a belt.

"Excellent, you're here. Have you eaten already or would you like crêpes?" 

"I had coffee and bacon but the crepes look delicious and I wouldn't turn one down if there's plenty. And if it wouldn't delay our conversation, I don't know if you want to go somewhere else for it."

"There's plenty. Let's grab one and go chat. Want to come on a town run? Turns out we all forgot to bring trash bags and hand sanitizer, so I'm going to have to go get some before cleanup really starts."

Nicole finishes her tea and tucks her phone away inside an elegant little satchel bag, making ready to go. She could've asked someone else in her camp to do the town run, but if they try and find a private place to sit quietly in camp, before long they'll be in somebody's way while everyone tries to pack things up. Talking in the car will be more comfortable, and involve no risk of someone trying to dismantle whatever tent they're in and dropping it on their heads. 

"Fine by me." She'd hate to try to have an important conversation while having to look at the road instead of someone's face, but being the passenger is easy enough. She gets a crepe and a paper plate and follows Sir Nicole to the car.

Nicole has a vintage pale blue convertible sports car which people keep telling her not to bring to events in fields. She keeps ignoring them because sometimes she gets to have fun with her aesthetic, damnit. It handles the grass fine. (She's not fussy about Sergia eating in the passenger seat so long as Sergia is very careful about crumbs.)

She really likes the car, so she's already in a good mood when she turns out of the campsite and gets on the road. It's improved even more when the heating kicks in and the morning air starts warming up inside. 

"So, you've slept on it and had plenty of time to come up with questions. Ask whatever you like."

She will not get crumbs on maybe-her-future-knight's very fancy car seat! She will instead pull out her notes.

"So, overall I'm excited and I definitely want to join the fight, and I think there are a number of historical virtues I can work with. But also lots of questions. To get the downer stuff out of the way first: how likely am I to die? I kinda figure there's a learning curve where if I die it will probably be soon while I'm less experienced but the risk will never be trivial."

"I will do my absolute best to not let you die, and I'd hope that if you intend to promise me any sort of fealty, it's because you trust me to protect you in return. That's the deal." Nicole is watching the road and that actually makes it easier to show significantly more emotion than anyone normally sees from her (though she still doesn't raise her voice at all - if anything she's a little quieter, as though her lungs suddenly are slightly short of air). She would normally do more thinking before she speaks, about the difference between the things she wants to say and the things Sergia needs to hear - and Nicole isn't certain whether her assurances of protection will actually reassure Sergia, because it isn't like she's the scariest knight on the tournament field or like she could singlehandedly slay all the monsters in the world - but she needed to say it for her own sake. She's a little surprised by her own fire.

Huh. Yeah. She supposes she really wouldn't tolerate Sergia dying on her watch.

But that's not the thing Sergia asked about. Her possible-future-student probably wants the actual data on the learning curves. So she takes a single calm breath, thinks carefully, and says, "I'm not sure exactly what the data on mortality over time looks like, but off the top of my head, I think the risk is actually highest with new peers. When people are recognised for their skill, that's a time they feel encouraged to attempt harder things and take more risks, and simultaneously they're no longer under anyone's specific protection and people are more likely to assume they can handle themselves without help. That's a bad combination. On a similar theme, I wouldn't worry about your first few weeks, when everyone is hyper-aware of having a newer fighter along and feeling very protective about you. The danger zone is if the novelty is wearing off and people are starting to think you can handle yourself, and simultaneously you're thinking you're getting used to this and can start doing more dangerous moves. I suggest that if you're going to get cocky and try something dumb, you do it while people are still watching you like hawks, and not right after they stop doing that." 

"That makes sense, and it's definitely a temptation I'll need to watch out for. Next downer question: are we winning or losing? Are there more fighters and fewer demons every year, or the reverse, or is it more complicated than that?"

"We are usually mostly winning until we're suddenly not. There will be stretches of years where, while I wouldn't say everything is fine, everything is quite possible for us to deal with without making unacceptable sacrifices. Every so often, a much bigger threat will come along and we'll suddenly be in true crisis mode and often we'll lose someone or something important trying to handle it. There's never certainty that the next true crisis isn't going to be the one that gets us."

"I don't want to make confident conclusions about whether the world overall is getting much worse or much better, because we're certainly not the only group that handles demons and I don't have an overview of the entire war effort. I'm going to try and never tell you I know something if I don't."

Sergia nods thoughtfully and asks a question that wasn't in her notes. "Is there anyone with an overall view of the strategic picture? Someone who can notice problems and maybe help different kingdoms or different conspiracies coordinate resources? I guess there'd be difficulties getting the SCA to work with a group with a different aesthetic without compromising everyone's mindsets, but--it's a global centuries-old problem, I figure there's someone with a giant world map and a pile of spreadsheets and a book of phone numbers and a plan for the next hundred years."

"Not to my knowledge, no. Quite possibly they exist but they're not interested in speaking to me. The groups in some parts of the world are descended from old orders like the Knights Templar, and they like to look down on us for being a twentieth century medieval reenactment organization instead of some centuries old noble family lines. Unfortunately, European colonizers killed a lot of this area's original guardians in the seventeenth century, so here we are, making do. Though there's still Native American groups doing just as much work as we do, and sometimes there's understandable reasons they don't want to talk to us either. Then there's the literal language barriers between some of the conspiracies, and the very different sorts of virtues and threats and magic we deal with - the metaphorical language barriers."

Someone should get all of the forces of Good working together, to whatever extent they have shared aims, but Sergia isn't going to be well placed to do anything about that for years if ever and it goes on the pile of long-term things. 

"There's coordination between the kingdoms, though, right? At wars, if nothing else. Also, how coordinated are the demons? Are they more like a bunch of organizations or a bunch of individuals or a bunch of rabid possums or a type of weather event?"

"Yes. We all send forces to your former kingdom once a year, for example, because there's a really nasty old god under Cooper's Lake - think a Cthulhu type of thing - and we put it back down whenever it annually attempts to wake up. That's Pennsic. Though for the most part we're dedicated to handling our own local problems." 

"Demon is a catchall term for all sorts of things that are either made of magic or use magic or were transformed by magic. I think I mentioned before that they're not fundamentally different to the artefacts we use. Your friend Lucia, for example, has an artefact involving pure holy fire which can and will burn you very badly if you touch it without being worthy of it - up to and including disintegrating you if you try to misuse its power too badly. Scale that up a little, have it be a creature with some real agency rather than an object that needs a bearer to do anything, suddenly you have a fire-demon going around killing people for being unworthy. In a case like that, we agree with the artefact that it is excellent when people like Lucia exist, and we disagree that it is okay to kill people for not being Lucia, so the difference between a useful artefact and an evil demon is mostly in how much we can keep it under control. In other cases, the magic is made out of values that we really don't agree with, like the ancient force of all the people who ever truly felt that killing their enemies was good and virtuous." 

"So the short answer is that most of those sound like things that I've encountered - there were things that were more like weather events or rabid possums, and other things that were more like organizations. Sometimes it's more like a raw expression of magic shaping itself into a ghost, and sometimes it's something more like a dragon that has a deep and transformational relationship with magic but is generally made of bone and sinew rather than pure ambient ether, and sometimes it's a human being who got hold of an artefact they shouldn't and kept doing very bad things with it - you'll sometimes hear that kind of person called sorcerer or witch. And very occasionally it looks a lot like an old god that throws thunderbolts at anyone who offends him, which sometimes means we have to placate rather than slay." 

As many as several of those things are unpleasant news! Lucia being in danger from her own artifact. Enemies too powerful to kill. Potentially having to fight other humans. "What does placating the ones we have to placate look like? Are there a lot of sorcerers? Are they or the ghosts ever possible to talk into making better choices?"

"It looks like diplomacy, basically, except for the fact that you are negotiating with things that aren't human. This is actually something we should discuss, because I'm a Rose as well as a knight. It's very rare in Atlantia, but Roses are a peerage order and we can take dependents if we really want to - obviously you can't become a Rose except by being the inspiration that wins Crown, but we can have retainers who are also students in the arts of grace and courtesy. If you want to be just a squire I'll teach you to fight. If you want to be a Rose's squire, I'll buy you a serious-duty sewing machine and we'll consider things like learning French." 

Nicole shoots Sergia a sideways joking grin to let her know that she is not seriously criticising Sergia's garb, but she is serious about the offer to make sure she has everything she needs to work on improving her garb. 

"Convincing people to make better choices should always be the preferred option, in my opinion. Some of the knights disagree, because both demons and people can lie and say they agree to not kill anyone and then go kill someone. I trust that every good Atlantian honourably tries their best to do what they think is right." 

"I agree that diplomacy is better than violence whenever possible. And I appreciate the offer to teach me grace and courtesy and sewing and French, but I think that's not where my talents lie and not what I want to focus on at the moment. Unless Atlantia really needs more diplomats such that it's worth my putting the work in even if it doesn't come naturally."

"No. A diplomat who isn't good at diplomacy can very quickly do more harm than good. If you just want to be a squire and learn fighting, then you should be a squire and learn fighting, and we'll keep you sensibly far away from anything shaped like a fey being that will do terrible things if you offend their incredibly elaborate politeness rules. You'll need to be introduced to Spike, obviously."

"Cool, great, fighting it is. What does it mean to introduce someone to Spike?" If the seahorse on the populace badge represents, like, an actual talking seahorse or something, that would be awesome.

"We get on a boat and you go meet the unicorn seahorse from Atlantis." 

"That's totally awesome!"

Nicole allows herself a rare undignified snort of laughter. "Yes. She is, in fact, totally awesome. It's like we have the Lady in the Lake handing out magic weapons from Arthurian myth, but the fair lady of Atlantia has a way bigger lake. Absolutely nobody can pronounce her full name so we call her Spike and she doesn't mind." 

"I look forward to meeting her. Speaking of going out on a boat, how much time a month do people usually spend on demon-fighting stuff? It sounds like a stupid question when I put it like that but I know there are peers with demanding jobs, it can't be completely all-consuming."

"I won't lie, it's tricky and it's a lot of your evenings and weekends, but we try to really prioritise people maintaining modern jobs and families. It's important for keeping us in touch, so we don't forget that we are modern people with modern values and a wealth of not-very-period scientific knowledge. Occasionally people have gone a bit off the deep end who didn't keep in touch with that." 

"It's important work. I'll keep my grades up and not go off the deep end."

"Next question: you mentioned there being someone who can edit memories, and that this gets done to people involuntarily. How often does that happen? I acknowledge the need for secrecy, I just want to know--how much of a cost we're paying for it."

"We really can't do a lot of editing in the sense of implanting false memories. It's really mostly just making people forget about magic they saw. And we try to avoid it, as much as possible. If someone's report of seeing a sasquatch is going to be basically dismissed as a crazy conspiracy, we're happy to leave them alone and talk about it online. Other times people can be magically sworn to secrecy on various things that will actually hold them to it. But if it's someone like you, who has enough of the full picture that you could explain it in a sensible way, and you'd know where to look for evidence and how to record enough evidence that you could get major journalists to take you seriously, and you're smart and knowledgeable enough that you might be able to hint at things or work around the exact wording of a magical oath enough to convey that to someone else - then, yes, you have to make people forget." 

"Sounds like it's not getting used very often, then. Do you ever get someone who sees a sasquatch-or-whatever and goes digging and ends up joining us?" That would be the weirdest way to get into this hobby of all time. "I guess random hikers are unlikely to want to cultivate chivalric virtue."

"Nope. Stumbling on something by accident doesn't prove that you're the kind of person who can handle this. You have to be the right sort of person first. I suppose if we were going to memory-wipe them but then we found out that they're actually an ICU nurse who fosters kids and spends her weekends volunteering at an animal rescue, then that'd be worth considering." 

"Yeah, that makes sense. What else did I want to ask . . . oh, what happens if someone fights demons for a long time and then gets permanently injured and can't fight anymore, or has a crisis of conscience and can't use any artifacts, or, um, gets R&D'd? I assume the answer in the first two cases is just that they stop coming to fights but can maybe still make things."

"You can retire. Lots of the older folks do. They teach, and lead, and they craft stuff that will become magical once it's been passed down a few generations - or they use magic tools to craft stuff that will have some magic immediately. Or they go back to being medieval re-enactors who are involved in an educational nonprofit which teaches people about ancient and Middle Ages history, which is a perfectly fine thing to be. If someone's R&D'd then it's usually going to involve a memory wipe." 

It's good that this is a situation it's possible to retire from even though she hopes not to have to for several decades. Also pretty freaky that it's possible to lose all your memories of something you were doing for years, though she's not personally worried because she can just choose not to suck.

"Alright. I think that's everything I was nervous about on the demon-fighting front, though I'll still want to talk about your expectations of your squires at some point. Yesterday I wrote down all the historical virtues I could think of and unless I'm missing something I think I should go for something like loyalty or honor or justice, or if there's Roman stuff that needs virtus or Greek stuff that needs reason and philosophy I could do one of those. Though possibly I should start by trying all the poorly understood artifacts from Atlantis to see if I get lucky. I can show you the whole list once we're parked if you want."

"We'll talk about expectations before we commit to anything, yes. I will let you try some of the Atlantis artefacts, but until you know more and I know more about you, you are not touching any of the ones that are known to burn people or eat their hands or rot their flesh off their bones. If none of those work, it would be perfectly traditional for me to give you a gift, and I have one that works on loyalty. If you're very attached to Greek ideas of reason, I'll probably ask Layla if she has any ideas or thoughts for artefacts along those lines. For justice, I'd check the archives. I poked around a bit yesterday night to see what's available, but I wanted to hear from you before I got too deep into it." 

Layla is a Laurel in Nicole's household who does Arabic mathematics and science.

"What made you pick those ideas? Loyalty, honour, justice? Do they feel easy, or do they feel uniquely you?"

She doesn't want to touch things that will rot your flesh off! Unless there's a very good reason and it sounds like there isn't. 

"So, the things that feel uniquely me kind of are the things that come easily to me? They're the things I think I can embody best, because I'd be working with my natural inclinations instead of against them and making myself more the person I want to be. Like, consider the difference between obedience and loyalty. I could work on being really obedient, but I think it would push me in directions I don't want to go, make me less willing to use my own judgement and take initiative and question things that don't seem right. And then loyalty is similar in terms of actions, sometimes, but the mental framing works better with my own sense of rightness--obeying someone because we share the same goals and I trust their judgement about how to achieve those goals, not because I'm ignoring my goals in favor of theirs. And then also the aspects of loyalty that are about helping your friends out when they're in a jam and valuing their well-being like your own are also natural and easy. So I can push myself in the loyalty direction with a lot less effort and internal tension than pushing myself in the obedience direction. Does that make sense at all?"

"Makes perfect sense, and that's solid reasoning. Loyalty's a good value. I think it comes easy to be loyal to a fair kingdom like Atlantia, but I suppose that's the loyalty talking." Warm, easy smile.

"I use some virtues that don't come easy to me, and they do push me in directions I don't necessarily want to go. That's just magic. Morality has power, and power accumulates over time, and so old morality has power. I find that it's worth it to walk that line and that careful balance. If you don't, you won't be useless even if you stick just to loyalty and other things you're comfortable with. If you do, you might be able to better serve your kingdom. But I'll certaintly never be the one to push you towards obedience - that'd be way too convenient for me. If you go that direction it'll be because you came up with it yourself." 

"I've been assuming the standard thing is to start with one artifact and expand over time, and I'm definitely willing to do harder virtues If they're strategically optimal. If it turns out the kingdom needs someone with a focus on, say, temperance or fortitude or something instead of loyalty, I would make it work, but probably not as well all else being equal."

"To a first approximation we always need the virtues that are difficult for modern people more than we need the ones that are easy for modern people. But for now we will start you off with easy things. You'll need some kind of weapon that is just barely magical enough that demons won't all be completely immune - my household has some swords that have been passed down among previous generations of the household and that'll be sufficient, you only need a few decades for that - and we'll try to set you up with one actual medieval artefact, something centuries old with an actual power you'll need to learn to use. Just one of those, for now. Eventually everything you use is likely to be varying levels of significant or magic." 

Nicole turns off the rural road into a tiny hamlet, which has a large supermarket right on the edge. She parks the car carefully at the edge of the market and looks across at Sergia.

"I can leave you in the car if you need a few minutes to think. If you want to come in, people might overhear us, so we can only talk about stuff that you would've talked to me about before you learned about magic. Up to you."

"I'll come in, it'll be a good time to ask regular squire questions." She hops out of the car and follows Sir Nicole towards the supermarket. "Have you had a squire before or would I be your first?"

"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.

"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. 

Oh wow, telepathy! "I hear you!" she whispers back excitedly. This absolutely has combat utility but learning how to use it effectively will be a whole thing, wow.

Nicole does not hear Sergia. It's one-way.

She flicks the fabric off with a practised wrist twist and holds it out to Sergia. "Don't try to communicate a ton, it's not exactly got gigabit bandwidth. The main thing is in recalling people. Give me a second..."

She fishes her phone out of her pocket and dials a number. Sergia will hear one half of the brief conversation: "Hey! Yeah, it's going well... yep, just got back... oh, nothing much, you're heading to the car park with some bags around now, right? Cool.... yes... would you like a quick lift? Okay, give me a minute, newbie's got the veil. Yep. See you in a sec."

Nicole hangs up. "Alright, I figured Raoulin would be an easy person to get for the first time. You ready to try and summon him?" 

It being one-way is strictly less useful but still very much so. "Oh wow, it teleports people?! That's so cool! How do I do it?" She very gently and carefully attempts to arrange the veil on her own head the way Sir Nicole had it on hers.

"So I'm not actually certain what it looks like from the perspective of other people and I'm pretty sure it doesn't strictly count as teleporting... Look around for the outlines in the distance and beckon that way. You have to say something fancy - the exact words don't actually matter, but invoke the ties that bind you, use the name, ask the target to be by your side - and put it over your eyes for a second. Don't worry about trying to focus or meditate or pull power out of your soul or whatever, magic doesn't care about an emotional state until it's lasted a year or two." 

She looks through the veil (that's so cool and so different, she'll have to get used to it quickly) and says, after a moment's thought, "Raoulin, my teacher's teacher, my fellow Atlantian, come swift as the wind and join us!" (She's not sure if she's allowed to call Sir Nicole her knight yet.) (If she's going to use this in combat she'll need to either figure out the shortest possible invocation that works, or get good at speaking fast.)

Magic feels good to use. Perhaps a little tiring, but the main feeling is one of intense belonging - of how good it is to be Atlantian, to love Atlantia, to have a place where you will always be welcome, to have faith and know you are faithful, to stand side by side with people and know that they have every reason to defend you and you have every reason to work with them, to sing patriotic songs with one voice, to feel a part of something greater, to be an heir to a proud tradition of excellence and service and strength, to unswervingly follow a star and feel no doubt about your sense of true north. 

It's an intense flash of feeling that comes directly from the veil and then probably fades, though whether and how it fades depends on how Sergia reacts. 

With the veil over her eyes, Sergia doesn't see Raoulin appear. When she moves it, he's just there.

Sir Raoulin has several large plastic boxes in his arms which he sets down immediately. He dusts his hands off and claps his hands twice. "Oh, nicely done, Nicole. You've figured out a whole new way to make the squire carry all the heavy shit. A true innovator." 

He has a warm smile for Sergia. He doesn't know her as well as he might like, but if nothing else, being able to use the veil at all is proof that she's a true and loyal addition to the war effort. 

Huh. Nicole has asked people what that looks like several times, and they've always just said they weren't sure, and Nicole was all 'how can you possibly not be sure, you were watching' but.... wow, yep, she really isn't sure what just happened. It's sort of like she got intensely absentminded and lost in thought for a second and then when she jerked herself out of her reverie, her old knight was just there. How could she possibly have just not been paying attention...? 

"Maximum range of a bit under three miles at sea level, cooldown of several hours if we use it at a range like this.... she'll have to do plenty of the old-fashioned kind of carrying all the heavy things." 

Sergia smiles back! She just did magic with a magic artifact and she's going to get to fight a dragon! (Having loyalty-feelings directly stirred up in her head is maybe a problem in the long term, but she does in fact love Atlantia and if it's addictive or something Sir Nicole will warn her about it so it's fine and she lets herself enjoy it.)

"What's the cooldown like at typical combat ranges? I'm assuming it mostly gets used for getting injured people back out of the melee. And would you like help getting those the rest of the way to your car?"

"There's no single typical combat range. I've found I'm basically limited by my own invocations and gestures and reaction times at sub fifty metre ranges. About a minute at two hundred metres, about three hours at the six hundred metres we just did, multiple days at max range. Your line-of-sight isn't blocked by most narrow obstacles and mostly people won't be randomly behind super-thick castle walls or metallic sheets, so your three-mile range is mostly about the curvature of the earth. Be really careful if you're up on a big hill with a great view, because if you try to fetch someone from fifty miles away then I don't know how long you'll lock yourself out for."

"You can use it on people who aren't injured. It lets people go into closer range and take more risks, if they know you're immediately going to fetch them back out once they get their hit in. For now don't use it on anyone who isn't injured, explicitly asking for it, or looking like they're imminently going to die, or you'll risk messing someone up who was very happy where they were. If someone with a glowing shield is standing in front of other people looking protective, feel free to fetch the people hiding behind the one with a magic shield, do not fetch the person who is carrying a magic shield or you'll get people killed."

"Don't feel like you need to fetch Nicky much. She's tougher than she looks. Mostly bombproof. And yes, I'd love help, if you're not needing to run to your camp to help them pack down." 

"For the record, he is the only person on this planet allowed to call me Nicky, and that's only because I lost a bet. Don't try me."

Nicole gathers up all her things. "I need to run these to Rosemary camp. Sergia, you will try not to die if I leave you with Sir Raoulin?" 

"Don't push the range past three miles, don't grab anyone who's not asking injured or about to get killed, don't grab shieldbearers off the guys behind them, got it," she says, carefully folding the veil bag into its box and putting the box at the bottom of her handbag. "I will try not to die and expect I'll succeed."

"Okay. Raoulin, no telling her stupid stories about me falling off horses until she gets a red belt so I can order her not to repeat them."

Nicole waves and heads off to Rosemary camp with shopping. 

"I have no idea why she thinks I would do that. None at all." A very innocent look, spoiled when he can't resist a wink and a wicked grin. 

The boxes are a much more reasonable load when each person picks up half of them.

"My car's not far, it's the big red truck over there. She's not working you to death already is she?" 

Heave ho. "Nah, just--being effortlessly cool in a way that makes me feel competitive, but I have no effortless coolness skill with which to compete, so instead I carry things. When you said she was hard to kill, did you just mean she's really good at not getting hit, or is there magic for toughness?"

"I'm sure she'll teach you to be effortlessly cool. I can't help - she sure as hell didn't get it from me."

Raoulin has an easy charm, but it's a sort of rough-and-ready, humble, simple-hedge-knight friendliness - very different to Nicole's dignified, polished femininity. He wears jeans, mismatched socks, and a hoodie which has TYPICAL ATLANTIAN THUG across the back. The front of the hoodie has a cartoonish picture of a unicornate seahorse, armed with boxing gloves on each fin and using its tail to hold a stack of folding chairs. It is actually quite easy to believe that Nicole did not get her sense of style from this man. 

"Probably the relevant thing for the near future is that she's fireproof and generally reasonably dragonproof. Though not infinitely."

"That is both good, and good to know! Is it generally considered polite to ask someone what magic they have? I'd like to get more of a sense of what's out there."

"You can ask, though some folk don't like thinking of it as magic. Just like how some folk will rather think of a dragon as a dragon, and others will call it just a type of demon. Just because we don't understand exactly how it works don't make it magic in my opinion."

"Let's see... I have a very little truesight, I've got a feather-light unbreakable lasso, I conjure horses and food - that's two separate powers - my sword glows when there's enemies nearby and I can be invisible. And I'm quite lucky. Don't try and keep track of everything everyone does, you'll go crazy remembering it all, and you don't want to be expecting an assist from someone when a specific thing is on cooldown. Short version is, I'm a scout and a ranger, and everything in my powerset is there to help me do that."

"That makes sense. Though I assume the horses are temporary. What did you mean by, just because we don't understand how it works doesn't make it magic? That there's probably a way it all works that scientists could theoretically figure out if they got the chance?"

"I don't know. Maybe it's God. Maybe it's super scientifically advanced aliens. Maybe I'm just not a fancy-pants smart guy who'd be able to figure it out, but maybe you will and someday they'll be talking about how it's all based on virtuion particles and moraliwaves."

Raoulin reaches his red truck and tosses the boxes into the back, then reaches out for the ones Sergia is carrying. 

"Not me, I'm too bad at math. But it'd be good if someone did." She hands over her stack of boxes. "I should go help finish packing out Kalomeros camp, but I'll see you later."

"See you at dinner!"

Raoulin jogs all the way back to his camp. He gets bored if he doesn't move fast.

She hikes back to camp, slightly less fast but still briskly, and joins in striking the larger tents and any camp infrastructure that hasn't been piled into a truck yet as well as dealing with her own small tent and large suitcase.

Roger is blasting My Chemical Romance from a Bluetooth speaker and singing along at the top of his voice while he scrubs grease and burned food off from the borrowed kitchen equipment. 

"NA NA NA NA NA NA NA - oh hi Sergia - NA NA NA NA NA NA NA MAKE NO APOLOGY NA NA NA NA NA NA NA IT'S DEATH OR VICTORY NA NA NA NA NA NA NA ON MY AUTHORITY CRASH AND BURN YOUNG AND LOADED - you here to lend a hand? - DROP LIKE A BULLETSHELL NA NA NA NA -" 

"Yeah!" she yells over the music, grabs another sponge and gets to work. The grease stands no chance against their powers combined.

Roger dives into the next song with equal enthusiasm. "WELL IF YOU WANTED HONESTY THAT'S ALL YOU HAD TO SAY! I NEVER WANT TO LET YOU DOWN OR HAVE YOU GO IT'S BETTER OFF THIS WAY! FOR ALL THE DIRTY LOOKS - THE PHOTOGRAPHS YOUR BOYFRIEND TOOK -"

The grease comes off pretty easily under the combined powers of their scrubbing. 

Thorsteinn understands that Roger is like this for reasons and is used to being understanding about it but, "Roger I think that is clean enough to go in the van now, it isn't ever actually going to be spotless." 

"THORSTEINN! I've been meaning to ask you about that heraldry idea I had - hang on I have to sing along to this bit - NOT OOOOOOKAAAAAAAY I'M NOT OOOKAAAAAAAAAAAAY!!!" 

Sergia tetrises kitchen bits into the van. "Ooh, what's the heraldry idea?" Mostly the only heraldry she does is the yelling kind, but it's cool to listen to people talk names and devices, especially weird ones.

"So Thorsteinn said I'm not allowed to have a unicorn that vomits rainbows, right, but what if I had a unicorn maintaining a rainbow? You're allowed to have cats and dogs maintain things in their mouths rather than necessarily holding them in their paws and you said a rainbow is a period charge so-"

Thorsteinn: "After I kill you I am going to throw your body in the ocean so nobody has evidence to contradict me when I tell them you died of syphilis." 

"I think if it was maintaining a rainbow it'd be, like, sticking out both sides of its mouth like a dog with a stick. Are there rules about what can be maintaining what? I think the thing doing the maintaining has to be smaller, but could you have, like, a dragon with a lion in its mouth? A lion with one of those charges that's just a geometric shape?"

"Yes. Thorsteinn, I want whatever it is she just said. I want the unicorn to play fetch with the rainbow -" the song is getting to the chorus again "- I'M NOOOOOOT OOOOOOOKAYYYYY" 

"I don't think SENA says anything about what sort of charges can be maintained so I'd have to check the precedents and I'm not going to do that right now because I need you to help me fill in the sump and also because you are singing My Chemical Romance loud enough to wake the dead." Thorsteinn is very mildly exasperated but does appreciate that Sergia is doing some good tetrising. 

Sergia kind of wants to talk to Roger about magic, but she doesn't want to shout about magic to be heard over the MCR and she doesn't have anything urgent to ask, so she'll pack up quietly until Roger turns it off or everything is squared away and it's time to get off the site.

Roger will turn the music off once he realises Thorsteinn is annoyed by it, and help everyone tetris kitchen things into the van. Then he has his own tent to pack up. 

"Hey Sergia? If you're free can you also help me with the tent I lent Aaliyah? She had to leave last night and I said I'd handle it."

(Aaliyah is a newbie that Roger arranged for a spare tent to be lent to, because she doesn't have her own camping supplies yet. It's definitely not his tent, either - he doesn't have "spare tent lying around" money. It might be Reynhard's. It might be any of the many people Roger has an uncanny knack for extracting resources from whenever he's trying to help the newbies.)

The tent is neon orange and glaringly modern, and is hidden just behind Roger's tent at the back of camp, so that it doesn't show up in camp photos. 

"Sure! I hope Aaliyah had fun." She heads over thataway.

"Did you have fun?"

Roger cranes his head around the side of his bigger tent, rope and stake in hand, to give Sergia a slightly concerned look. 

"I did! And then I had, not fun, but something else good. I'm glad I finally know what's going on. I'm scared about tonight, but in the way where I wouldn't miss it for the world, you know?"

"Yeah, I don't think I know, but I can - what's the word where you feel bad for someone but don't feel it yourself, is that sympathy or empathy? Sympathi- fuck!" 

Roger extracts the main pole from the centre of his tent, which causes a lot of canvas to fall on his head. He starts fighting his way out while swearing extensively.

"- so which is the part you wouldn't call fun? You don't think magic is fun as hell?"

Oh dear. Sergia picks up the canvas-edge nearest Roger and helps him tunnel his way out from the other side.

"Magic is totally awesome, I have a veil that teleports people! It just feels too serious to call it fun. Maybe that's bullshit, maybe it just is fun."

Roger emerges grinning.

"You have a veil that teleports people, that's at least a little fun. If you do it to me can I yell WHEE like I'm a kid going down a waterside?" 

"I could not possibly stop you and wouldn't if I could!"

"Let's fucking go!!"

Roger can handle his medieval canvas tent on his own from here. He shoos Sergia back towards Aaliyah's borrowed modern tent.

"Once you know what you're doing you'll probably end up with a few different virtues you work with. Most of the knights have seven. I think I'm the only person I know that only works off one, all my channels the same thing. So I don't know how it works for other people but for me using magic just feels really good, it's just - it's always fun even when the situation gets serious or crazy."

"It does feel good, doesn't it! I've read enough fantasy novels to be suspicious of any magic that feels that good, honestly, but it doesn't seem to be corrupting everyone into Nazgul or whatever so I guess it's just awesome. Is your one virtue 'being one hundred and ten percent unafraid of getting hit' because that's badass."

"You nailed it. Well, technically courage, but being not afraid of fuck all is a strict superset of being not afraid of getting hit - uh, strict subset? That's even less things I'm afraid of. Or more things I'm not afraid of. Ow!"

The last exclamation is prompted by Roger pulling a stuck tent stake out of the ground with sufficient force to elbow himself hard in the stomach. It was stuck until it suddenly wasn't. He shakes himself and goes for the next stake. 

Sergia is currently trying to pull out a tent stake and comprehensively sucking at it. Fuck tent stakes and fuck her lack of upper body strength.

"Does that mean I'm going to end up needing to teleport you out of a jam, or that I should absolutely not teleport you out of a jam unless you lose an arm and keep going like the Monty Python black knight?" Wow she really hopes that doesn't happen, it was funny until her brain generated a realistic mental image.

Eventually the power of twisting the tent stake, kicking it, twisting it some more, wiggling it back and forth, and calling it a piece of shit prevails.

"I have no idea. I guess other people are higher priority if you gotta start saving people."

Roger doesn't bleed, which makes it really difficult for healers to tell when he's badly in need of attention. Unfortunately the healers all know that, and fuss over him like mother hens when he absolutely doesn't need their attention and just wants a beer. The last thing he needs is someone who can magically teleport him from the tavern back to camp and tell him it's bedtime.

"I would absolutely keep going like a Monty Python black knight, though, I have only bitten a bad guy once but there was something really satisfying about it. Demon tasted terrible, but it's the.... primal disinhibited ferocity of getting to rip stuff with your teeth, or something? 11/10, would bite again." 

" . . . We live interesting lives, don't we. I'm glad you're good at it and good at enjoying it. I don't really know how I'm going to react, but you're setting a good example."

"That is the first time in my entire life that anyone has ever called me, a high school dropout who works in a bar, a good example. Can you write that down so I can frame it?"

Aaliyah's modern tent is easier to take down than Roger's period canvas tent, so Sergia will probably finish before Roger does. Once that happens he will enlist her help in folding up the giant sheets of heavy canvas, which is definitely a two-person job, but easy enough if each person takes a corner. 

"I'll get one of the scribes to make you a little certificate." She helps fold up the heaviest and most obstinate bedsheet and heave it back into its box.

"I will treasure it forever!"

Fold fold. 

"So have you gotten your magic rock yet?" 

"No, just the veil, unless you're speaking metaphorically." 

"Oh, no, someone must have forgotten to give you the magic rock - it's very important! Here, for now - have one of mine!"

Roger pulls a plain white pebble from his pocket and holds it out to Sergia in an outstretched palm. 

Very serious business, magic rocks. Very serious indeed. 

Did he find a rock this morning just to be silly, that's delightful. "Ooh, thank you! What does it do?"

"First you got to lick it to activate it."

This results in a peal of giggles. "If it's one of yours, then surely you've already licked it, and it's a universal law that anything you've licked is yours forever, so clearly I have to go get a new one."

"No, no, it's a spare one I have! I've never licked this one!" 

"....but if you want to get a new one you'll just have to magically prepare it first. Better wash it in boiling water so it's safe to lick, and then you have to do a ritual where you put the rock on your head and do a special dance at midnight." 

"Oh, well in that case." She exaggeratedly licks the rock. It doesn't taste like anything.

"Once you've licked it, to get it to be yours, then you gotta sing it a song. That's the other part of activating it. You should hold it very gently when you sing to it." 

"Oh, I have to sing to it? That's serious business. I should pick something I know really well. Scaaaaarlet, fight for the banners of scarlet, fight 'til the fields they run scarlet . . ."

Roger is going to need to interrupt her if he doesn't want to hear eight choruses and seven verses of Æthelmartian patriotism.

"Careful! It's an Atlantian rock!! It is deeply offended by this Aethelmartian song! You'll confuse it!" 

Sergia gets through another two lines before being overtaken by giggles and losing the beat. Once she gets back to breathing properly she switches to Atlantian Steel. (She loves both kingdoms and expects she always will.)

Roger enthusiastically joins in with singing Atlantian Steel to the rock. He is a solid tenor - nothing exceptionally rich or bright, but confident and expressive and generally on key. He is very fierce about no blackguard's flag shall darken Atlantia's sky!

"So the next step in the magic rock activation is you have to go show it to five people and get them each to bless it."

"Gotta give everyone a turn to mess with the newbie, huh? I'm not sure how many people are still on site. We'll see how many I run into getting all this stuff to the cars."

"Damnit, you catch on way too fast. You knew before we started singing, didn't you."

The campsite is pretty much packed up at this point. Roger heaves a box into the air with an exaggerated groan at its weight. 

"Yeah. But, you know, excuse to sing! Want a hand with that?"

"I'm good with this one but I won't complain if you want to grab another one!"

Heave ho.

In short order everything is into the appropriate cars and the site is clear, leaving Sergia plenty of time to get to the restaurant where House Rosemary is having pre-battle dinner.

The group from Camp Rosemary has assembled at a local fusion place that seems to be doing a mixture of Southern barbecue and Korean barbecue. It's not Nicole's favourite, but her cousins seem to think it's a mixture of two of the best things to ever exist and she's happy to go along with it. 

Adele and Jean are here for dinner, though they're too retired to join a dragon hunt. Even at a random restaurant that isn't set up to accommodate them sitting at the head of the table, it's clear from the way people move around them that they are the fountain from which Rosemary flows.

Nicole remembers how intimidated she was by Jean when Jean was her own grandknight. When she was a squire she'd known that she would happily follow Raoulin into hell, and she'd also known that Raoulin would happily follow Jean into hell, and so even when she'd barely known the man she had felt a shy sense of deference towards him. She can't imagine how Sergia must feel about him, and his consort Adele - plenty of people never meet their great-grandknights, and Jean has a quiet self-assuredness that visibly warps the social fabric around him.

There are twenty people at dinner because Rosemary is a huge household. 

Adele's former apprentice, Layla, sits with Adele's current protege Ludmila and Layla's own apprentice Valandi. Jean's former squires, Raoulin and Colyne (both knighted long ago), are engaged in a fierce debate about sports on the other end of the table. Colyne's wife Muriel listens very politely and occasionally interjects. Ludmila's husband Kiallakr is chatting happily with Raoulin's current man-at-arms Fearchar and Colyne's two current squires, Oste and Johannes. Colyne's former squire Sir Lluwelin is explaining melee tactics to Violet (Johannes' partner), next to Arnkatla (Raoulin's wife), who is excitedly telling Flavia (Lluwelin's man-at-arms) about Viking shipbuilding. 

Nicole will be very sympathetic if Sergia can't keep track of the entire family tree straight away.

When Sergia arrives Nicole is standing and explaining the SCA to the waiter, who was very excited to see so many people wearing "funny clothes". About one-third of the household is still in garb. 

Sergia knows several of these people by face and is able to infer a couple more given the context and who's sitting next to whom, but, what's the Bilbo Baggins quote, she doesn't know half of them half as well as she should like. She's 99% immune to peer fear, but her knight's knight's knight is intimidating enough as a concept and a person that she's nervous anyway. Fortunately there are So Many people at this dinner, so she can get used to being near Jean and Adele and get a sense of how they interact with people from several seats away.

Awwww, yay, there is Explaining To A Surprised Person going on! Explaining to surprised people is a joyous and important duty, and very occasionally you get a newbie out of it. Sergia grins at Sir Nicole and the waiter with an unobtrusive little wave, then heads towards a seat near where it looks like Sir Nicole is planning to sit down and within earshot of the shipbuilding conversation. She'd like to get to know Raoulin and Arnkatla a bit better, Flavia she's already hung out with a fair amount, and also she wants to hear about shipbuilding.

Arnkatla is a viciously sharp older woman who radiates a certain joie de vivre whenever she is correcting someone's Latin grammar or fixing someone's hair judgementally, but she has more than enough protective warmth to make up for an occasional lack of tolerance for fools. She is in the middle of telling Flavia, "Well, using a rudder instead of a steering oar wasn't possible until changes to ship shapes that made the sternposts straight, which if I remember correctly was sometime in the eleven-hundreds- oh, Sergia! It's good to see you!" 

Flavia had her back to Sergia, but at this she turns around and gets a bright smile on her face. "Sergia! You're here! It's so good you made it!"

Flavia was briefed earlier and told to be normal, but she is ridiculously excited to have a .... squire-first-cousin? squire-cousin-once-removed? same-generation-relation-of-some-kind? She will figure this out later when she is not learning about shipbuilding. 

"It's good to be here! How much of an advantage is having a rudder instead of a steering oar, does it let you sail closer to the wind or turn faster or something?"

"It's a thing as ships get larger and you want to take them on bigger oceans - a steering oar is perfectly fine for canoeing down a river, but moving a big ship is very tiring for the poor oarsman and gets in the way of handling the sails. So with ships getting bigger and going on longer journeys, it kind of becomes a necessity." 

"Oh, that makes sense! You'd still need someone to hold the tiller or the wheel or whatever, right? But that sounds easier than doing the same thing with an oar."

"Yes, exactly, and the Northern fixed steering oars weren't working as well as the Mediterranean steering oars and that may have been part of what pushed Northern European rudders to develop - but also, Flavia, to go back to what you were saying before, I don't think you understand how different these distances are. From, say, Dubrovnik to the east coast of Italy is... a hundred miles, maybe a hundred fifty. Norway to Iceland is more like eight hundred miles. Crossing Lisbon to Central America is more like four thousand miles."

Flavia's nodding along. "And you need different kinds of navigation, if you're going far away from land?"

"...I don't really know how much of a factor that is. You can maintain a constant course with just reference to the stars, if you're not trying to be incredibly precise about knowing where you are at all times. I could point you towards some books probably, I remember this one fascinating discussion of whether Sunstones are allegorical.... but they clearly made it to L'Anse aux Meadows, so they were doing something right."

It's so good when her nerd friends are nerds about things!

Lluewellin and Violet have reached a natural pause in their conversation, and Lluewellin turns across to Sergia. He doesn't know her well - he lives almost an entire state away, these days - but he trusts Nicole's judgement immensely so he's willing to reckon Sergia a friend. "Sergia! It's good to have you here! How was your event?"

"It was great! Fought a lot, sat around chatting a lot, put tents up and took them back down. Learned several things," she adds with a wry smile and plenty of plausible deniability.

"...you don't have to talk in code, we all know," Flavia says. "Just - nothing super obvious loud enough for the other tables in the restaurant."

Lluwellin sighs exaggeratedly. "Flavia, maybe she meant she learned things about swordfighting on the fighting field?"

Flavia, after a second, nods very innocently. "Of course she meant that! But we don't want to alarm normies by talking loudly about killing people with swords!" 

"I did also learn things about swordfighting! There was this one bout with Roger where . . ." It is time for that classic fighter activity, talking about your fights in detail with lots of gestures!

Flavia listens intently to Sergia's fighter stories with all the appropriate reactions of "Wow!" and "Yes!" and enthusiastic laughter.

Lluwellin has a story about how he ran in between five people on the melee field and managed to get two of them to hit each other and die to friendly fire, and then killed the other three with the same move because nobody ever learns. This story is recounted with plenty of exclamations of "BLAM!" and "BOOM!" and exaggeratedly-pain-faced "GOOD!" 

Sergia goes "Wow!" and "Nice one!" and laughs appropriately for Lluwellin! This household is so good and her friends are so good and the dragon is going to get its ass kicked.

Dinner is delicious and cheerful and full of camaraderie. Flavia spends much of it glued to Sergia, having apparently appointed herself in charge of making sure Sergia has a friend in every interaction. There are several dishes ordered to the centre of the table for everyone to share, and Nicole picks up Sergia's tab, so there's not any shortage of food.

And then they all move their cars to an overnight parking lot so they can pile into the biggest ones, using only a few vehicles for carpooling - definitely not including Nicole's gorgeous car - and Sergia gets pushed into Raoulin's truck with five other people.

The talk turns to strategy. 

"When we get there," Raoulin explains to both Sergia and Flavia, "we think it's in its lair but we really cannot guarantee that. Stay in the middle of us, not behind us - behind is useless if it might fly in from any direction. You're looking to make sure you get caught in any protective magic that might suddenly go up. Once things kick off, you want to be at least two hundred feet away from it to not end up on fire. If you're not certain, go with the longbows, they know their ranges."

"Roger. Are we sure there's exactly one, or might it have friends? Do we know whether it's expecting us today in particular?"

"Exactly one, unless something has gone astonishingly wrong with our scouting, and I don't think I'm so blind as to miss a sixty thousand pound dragon - I am getting rather old though. Hopefully shouldn't be expecting us, but, ah, when your knight and I are sneaking through the forest in camouflaged cloaks we're quite stealthy, and when a hundred Atlantians show up in full plate we are a little tiny bit less stealthy."

"Heh, yeah. Um. I know I'm supposed to stay in the middle and if I end up in melee something has gone super wrong, but am I going to get a weapon more useful than a rattan sword?" It's fine if she isn't! She knows swords that can damage demons are scarce and if all of them are in the hands of people more capable than her that's super reasonable! But she wants an emotional support weapon something to fight with if things go pear shaped.

"Oh yeah. Uh, we were gonna wait until we were out of the car because Nicole is all fancy shmancy and serious but if you want it now - wait, Nicole, did you get the rosemary?" 

"I have rosemary. - Sergia, I'm afraid this is our dumbest household tradition." 

"I'll have you all know it is actually the funniest household tradition."

"I'm fine waiting for the appropriate moment! I don't want to mess up the tradition."

Flavia is so mad that they are not doing her favourite thing yet. She is suppressing the desire to bounce up and down about it.

"Dragons don't have vulnerable stomachs, that's a fantasy thing. They're huge flying creatures, they get attacked most often from below them by things that are smaller than them or below them. If you have to stab one, stab it in the eye or go for the joints. Scales aren't as thick on the joints, and they're soft if you get it right inside the elbow or the knee."

"Got it. Is the inside of the mouth a vulnerable spot? Asking purely out of curiosity and not because I have any desire to make use of the information. Also are there any signals I should learn less obvious than 'charge' and 'retreat'?"

"Please for the love of all that is holy, do not try to climb inside the dragon's mouth to stab it!" 

"...it is vulnerable inside its throat but not right inside its mouth, it's got a bony plate in the roof of its mouth so it's only vulnerable quite a bit deeper. You're better off stabbing up its nostrils or going through the eye, seriously."

"Why do you know that?" Flavia squeaks.

Fearchar also seems quite thoroughly intimidated. 

Lluwellin just smiles. "She's... pretty hard to kill."

Sergia's knight is the coolest knight ever and she's going to help Sergia get that cool someday and that's awesome.

"More important question: given that my job is pulling people out of danger, should I be standing next to a healer? What's our battle order going to be in general?"

Raoulin is somewhat worried that he has raised his former squire to be a bad influence and also immensely, deeply proud of her. But also he is going to make sure he is also available, in case Sergia needs a role model in her life who does not stand in dragonfire if he can damn well avoid it.

"Atlantia isn't the most organised of armies. Anything Sir Nicole, the baronage, or the Crown tell you to do is something you have to do. Anything the rest of us tell you is likely to be merely a very wise suggestion."

"...you should also generally do things Raoulin tells you to do, please. But yes, there's a whole mixture of Baronial groups and household groups and individual heroes out there. We are pretty big on the heroes."

"I think we were going to stick Sergia with Ludmila, right, because she's a healer?" 

"If you're cool with that, Sergia. You can go with Cináed, as well, if you feel more comfortable with someone you presumably know a bit better."

"I recognize Ludmilla well enough to stay close to her, that's the important bit. In the unlikely event that two people I'm supposed to obey say conflicting things, is there a better rule to follow than 'do whichever one the people around me are doing?'"