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Blarney had agreed to meet Halle without question, and pretty much the split second the message came in. He'd missed Halle, but between school and Squirehood and his freaking sister awakening, not to mention his baby cousin, he'd been too busy to just casually catch up.

But that didn't mean Halle - and, more specifically, Halle's homework assignments, had been far from his mind:



He had kind of amazed himself that he'd actually done all the things on the list. Some of them he hadn't done as much of as he wanted - talking to alien Senshi, especially - but other parts had been stranger and more illuminating than he could have hoped. Namely, talking to the Code. That had been a wild night.

And, closely related to that memory and another task on the to-do list was get to know other Knights. he thought of Valhalla, the Jupiter Knight that had taken him to the Moon, and smiled a little to himself; he needed to check in with him, too. Make sure he was still fighting the good fight (or, ideally, taking some well-deserved time off with his family).

Yeah, he'd learned a lot over the past few months. A lot a lot. Some of the fury of his questions had died out naturally, as the reality of this new life settled in around him, but some of his questions remained. Where was the safety net for new Pages, or even new Senshi, like Winters? She had powered up in their home, for cripes sake. There had to be a better way...

He should talk to Viatrix again. See if she had made any progress on a Page Tracker or something. Page Counter? Page-r? Pager...

Blarney shook his head at himself and refocused as he approached Halle. He had sensed him, of course, and knew Halle could sense him too, but that was different than seeing his familiar colors there illuminated against the park's dark background. Something twanged in his chest; a lot had changed since last he'd seen Halle. A lot a lot.

"Hey," Blarney said with a grin as he approached. "Been a while. How ya doin', stranger?" Blarney liked to think of himself as a little bit more calm now than he had been as a Page. Sure, he still had plenty to be stressed about - and boy was he ever stressed about those things - but...he had more confidence that he could figure it all out, sooner or later.

Maybe it was the knowledge that he had his wall now, or that he had an actual castle for a Wonder, or maybe it was just that he wasn't in high school anymore. Maybe it was all of those things, or maybe it was just that he hadn't nearly died in a while, and that behavior tended to make one's brain a little less likely to be nothing but a series of exclamation marks all the time.

"Is everything okay?" Blarney asked as he sat down next to him on the bench. He examined Halle a little more closely - it didn't look like he was missing any limbs or anything. That was a good start. He wanted to ask for more details about where they were going - 'space' was an awful big place. He assumed that Halle would be taking him to - well, to Halle, but maybe they would go to the Moon instead. Or maybe Halle would take him to someplace totally new. With magic, you really never knew what to expect, so Blarney was doing his best to roll with it, whatever 'it' happened to be that day.

"I get it completely," Blarney said with an easy smile as he shook Halle's hand quickly. "No worries. Between real-life stuff and family stuff..." Blarney shook his head. "I haven't exactly been the most social of butterflies either, so don't even worry about it.

"Buuut," Blarney said after a moment, pulling the note with his 'homework' on it out to look at it briefly, before he handed it over to Halle. "I have made some progress," he said, a small note of pride in his voice. "Some of it - like, some of it I crossed off even though they're kind of - continuing assignments, if that makes sense? Like, I haven't talked to every alien Senshi, probably, but I've helped out on a couple different Chaos clears and talked to some folks there," he said. Had Halle been there with him? He thought so, but honestly, he couldn't remember. He barely remembered last week, let alone the other people that had joined him on an inter-planetary fight for Order from months ago.

The word lodge buffered into his brain a moment or two later, and Blarney raised an eyebrow curiously. "You have a lodge?"

Blarney noticed the look on his face, and was about to ask something - something like 'of course I really did all these things, you told me to, and more to the point, I all but forced you to write this list out for me, so it'd be a pretty jerky thing for me to do if I then totally blew it off, right?', or maybe something more like 'you think I did good, really?' with just an edge of desperation because sometimes he wasn't so sure, but then they were wooshing through the magical vortex that took them to...

It sure was a lodge. Blarney took a moment or two to steady himself, reflexively catching himself on Halle as the world settled back down around him. It was always a disorienting experience, planet-hopping, Blarney had to admit that landing here (rather than on a Chaos-infested world) was more pleasant than some other landings he'd experienced.

Halle was beautiful. A soft gasp escaped him as the path was lit, and he broke out into a huge grin as the lodge itself seemed to wake up to greet them. He glanced around them, taking in the rest of the planet. It smelled sweet, and hopeful, and soft, and Blarney felt his shoulders drop an inch or two in spite of himself. Something about being off Earth (almost) always relaxed him.

"It's beautiful," Blarney murmured. It felt wrong to speak at full volume here, with the hush the strange trees seemed to encourage. He made a mental note to bring Halle to Blarney sometime, once he had it further fixed up; it seemed only fair. He wanted to ask a million more questions -- questions like how had the lodge appeared when he first started out, how had he built it up, did he have any animals yet, were any of these flowers safe to eat...well, okay, maybe that last one was not one that would make the final cut of questions he eventually asked -- but he reminded himself why they were here in the first place, and his smile faded slightly.

"You said you had a lot to tell me," Blarney said, searching the other boy's face, "and that you had some touch and go moments. Are you okay? Really." It pained him to think that perhaps Halle had needed his help, and from sheer forgetfulness or distraction he hadn't been there if he'd been needed.

"Flowering...beasts?" Blarney echoed, raising his eyebrows slightly at the phrasing as he followed Halle in. He was a bit delayed in following him into the living room; he was distracted by the tapestries. They were gorgeous, and Blarney was sure the longer he looked at them, the more detail would emerge, and he was kind of fascinated, but--

But there would (hopefully) be time for that later, so Blarney joined Halle and shook his head. "Only thing I want is to hear your story," he said with an easy grin. Maybe once he was done, he could circle back to the food and drink thing - was there some kind of native Halle...an? Halle-ish? Halle-k? food or drink, like tea made from the flower part or meat made from the beast part of the creatures Halle had mentioned about.

What was the proper descriptive ending of this place? Blarney had no idea. To be fair, he also had no idea what the proper descriptive ending to Blarney would be, though, so maybe it didn't matter all that much.

"Is Northpoint a...place? A person?" Blarney draped himself languidly over one of the chairs, pleased with the comfort it provided. Had Halle built these, or had they come with the lodge? He had a lot of questions about how other people's Wonders put themselves together.

Blarney took the cup and took a sip, and then a full long drink - it was bright and fresh, and Blarney had a brief distraction in the form of if Halle could bottle this stuff-- but fortunately he kept the words from actually coming out of his mouth, which let Halle just...speak.

All humor had drained from his mind along with the blood from his face by the time Halle finished. People had gotten starseeded? It had never happened to him - he fervently hoped that it never would - but he knew what it was. Knew other people it had happened to. Blarney realized with faint surprise that he was gripping the cup very tightly, and he forced himself to relax.

You should have called me, Blarney thought, but again he kept himself from actually speaking it aloud; it was the height of hubris and self-centeredness to think that his presence and his presence alone would've made anything resembling a difference. He knew, after a moment of reflection, that it wasn't the fire-power he would have brought with him (or, really, the lack thereof, if he was being honest) that made him want to say something, but rather the brutal, piercing realization that Halle - Halle and all the people he went with, whoever they were - could have died.

And he never would have even known.

Blarney swallowed and lifted his eyes from the cup in his hand, which he had been staring intently at since Halle's story ended. He looked up at Halle and he couldn't help the way his eyebrows knit together in worry, but when he spoke, his voice was - more or less - steady.

"I'm really glad you're okay," Blarney said. He let that rest a moment, then set down his cup and took out his notebook and the purple sparkly pen that he still hadn't returned to his sister (and likely never would). "What did you take from the lab? What was the lab doing, like what were they making? What was the general's name, do you know?" Blarney was already scribbling down notes, the highlights from Halle's story - if nothing else, he would spread the word and keep other people, especially his family, from wandering into this extra-dangerous quadrant of the neighborhood. Had Halle already posted all this information to the Database? Blarney was slacking - he was supposed to stay up to date on this stuff on his own.

Maybe if he had - if he'd been paying attention - he would've been able to help Halle and the others. Blarney pursed his lips slightly as the thought crossed his mind. On the corner of the notebook page, he wrote in tiny but firm letters: do better.

Blarney frowned, wrote down 'Cahir' followed by a series of question-marks. Underneath that, he wrote 'lab' and 'did something comic booky to himself', followed by another series of question-marks. Halle said - what they 'used' wasn't meant to kill people. Did he mean something they found at the lab? Or...?

His head jerked back up at Halle's last word. He'd heard it somewhere before - he didn't know where, couldn't remember the context, but he definitely had heard it before. It hadn't felt important at the time...

...No, wait. It wasn't that it hadn't felt important. It was that there were eight hundred also-important things being discussed at the same time. He hadn't written it down, and he hadn't held it in his mind, but -

The Code. The Code had told him about brigades.

Or at least that they existed. Sort of.

"A brigade?" Blarney echoed, eyebrows knitting once more as he wrote the word down in his notebook and circled it. "What does that mean? The Code--it told me something about that, but not--" Blarney pursed his lips together. "But just the word, I don't...is that like, an official Group or something? If so, that's awesome!"

Even as he gave Halle a smile, Blarney felt a pang of something - maybe wistfulness, maybe jealousy, maybe some other secret third thing. Maybe annoyance at himself for focusing on the wrong thing, all the time forever...but no, he reminded himself. Things happened when they were supposed to, or whatever. He might never have pieced together what was happening if he'd been the one it was happening to. It was better this way.