Recruitment Tour (Quickdraw, Celeste, and Stareater)

Compassion appeared to disintegrate in the blink of an eye in response to the bolt of Whitespace being pointed at her. In reality, she had started going intangible in a cloud of stardust.

"I see Caius was not wrong about your temper," Compassion trailed. "I am not your adversary, mortal. Not unless you choose to harm the innocent. I am many abstract concepts made manifest - mercy, charity, kindness, comfort, and to a lesser degree, justice. Some call me the 'Matron of Change', the 'Matron of Virtue', and the 'Mother of Love'. Most call me 'Compassion'."

While she could elevate the spirits of the downtrodden who were willing to accept her comfort, Compassion couldn't force one into a calm state of mind. She had to rely on legitimate charm and persuasion to defuse the situation.

"In truth, your existence was known to me even before you became what you are...Astrid. I have many eyes watching this world for me," Compassion said. "A genius prodigy for your age, the discoverer of an extremely volatile source of energy - one that, in the wrong hands, could spell total destruction for humanity. I also know that the lives you ended when your powers were gained were completely by accident - had they been deliberate, this conversation would not be happening. I would have been forced to repay the lives lost that day with your own."

She raised her hands in a placating gesture, saying, "One of my own has also shown me your exploits since you have taken up your role as a hero. Your heroism on the Queen of the Atlantic, your selflessness at the Apollo Northern Key Manufacturing Plant. In both situations, I found your restraint and your sense of responsibility admirable. You could have easily swept either venue away, but you deliberately limited yourself, because doing so would risk the innocent. It is this sense of responsibility you feel that has prompted me to seek you out. I sense your heart and see that what evil lies within is suppressed by a blinding light within you. Would you hear my words?"

Stareater really didn't like being followed by strange people. If they tracked her down, it usually meant they were dangerous in some way. Not many people, even among the Empowered, could just appear out of thin air anywhere on the planet to speak to someone capable of circumnavigating the planet in a matter of hours under her own power. This reaction she had was one of practicality, a sheer fact of life that came with being someone so dangerous. When someone reached a certain level of power, namely the one she sat on, they usually made a habit of covering their asses in case somebody wanted them for something nefarious. And being who she was, Astrid didn't like the take such a chance.

She didn't have any knowledge of a "Matron of Virtue" or any of the mythological nonsense wizards got up to. The universe- This one, at least- Was strange and manifested in strange ways, but Astrid wasn't particularly interested in things like that, so she wasn't familiar with this.

"I don't know you," She warned, keeping Compassion right in front of her. Though, it was rather difficult to tell exactly where Stareater was looking with all that energy churning beneath her helmet. "So either you've been following me long enough to know about those things or you've just been looking for me. Either way, you had better choose your next words very carefully because I am not in the mood to take a chance right now." She seemed to relax just a little, but there was an obvious amount of tension radiating off of her.

"Stop moving," She demanded. "Don't try anything. Explain yourself."

"I know of you through one of my subordinates, Stareater," Compassion explained. "It is his duty. I rely on him to know when the forces of evil are on the move, and to keep me informed of likely candidates for my Knighthood to fight those very same forces of evil - candidates like yourself. If you must think of me as something in human terms, think of me as a goddess - even though that term would be inaccurate. I am not all-powerful. I am merely...an avatar. A representation of humanity's potential for good - including your own potential. For over eight millennia, I have watched humanity - seen it at its best, and at its worst."

Compassion's form betrayed no fear. She made no movement of her own - gravity had merely carried her down to the outcropping where Stareater was. Her eyes were those of kindness, understanding, hope.

"And having seen and fixated on humanity's negative aspects, there is another who would seek to conquer this world in the name of protecting humanity from itself. And unlike me, he would show no mercy to you, given the power you hold," Compassion stated. "To him, your destructive power would be something he would force into enforcing his ends, or - failing that - destroy it, along with you, for the mere sin of existence. To be anything but a normal human - in his eyes - makes you an abomination to be either corralled or destroyed. Perhaps you may believe me to be an alarmist, but I assure you: I speak the truth."

Hearing about that ship was something Stareater didn’t feel thrilled by. Her relationship with Rose was complicated, even before they became what they were now. Spending an eternity in a pale void where human connections didn’t exist did things to Astrid. Things that strangers had no right to know about. So yeah, Astrid and Rose didn’t really keep contact with one another, Astrid didn’t even know if she was alive anymore. It was… Difficult to keep such things in mind for someone in her position, to put it politely.

The lab where that machine had ran wild gave her a run for her money, no doubt about it, but she managed. It was more of a strategic challenge than anything. Still, she didn’t like someone spying on her that much. It implied other things were known. Other things that Astrid told herself only she knew.

And for that reason… She stood down a little more.

And what Compassion said wasn’t making her friendly, exactly, but she was describing a great threat. Something possibly world-threatening. A war, of a mystical sort, which was the kind of thing Stareater didn’t usually get involved with.

”If someone that powerful is planning to wipe humanity out, why haven’t you taken a chance to stop him?” She asked. ”You know him better than me. What do you want me to do about this? I’m not a sorcerer. If you’ve got the foresight to pinpoint me, of all people, you should have no trouble locating someone like him.”

"Locating him isn't the problem, Stareater. He's my brother, after all," Compassion said. "In ages past, we would take complementary roles. I comforted and tended to the sick, while he punished the evil. Then he withdrew from the world for millennia, while I remained to help. And when I saw him again, he was...changed. Zealous, assured that his methods would end all chaos in the world and lead it to a utopian future. He fails to see how his methods - devoid of regard for collateral damage - could backfire. In some ways, I see you as him - if you're willing to restrain your own power for the betterment of others, and to punish only the guilty...then maybe you could protect the innocents from him, as my Knighthood is sworn to do. And, perhaps, in encountering you - a teenager with such a strong moral code - he may find a bit of who he used to be."

Compassion had laid her cards on the table - in Astrid, she saw the brother of her own past. The being who punished evil and protected the innocent. And Astrid knew restraint, too. She knew temperance. And that's exactly what Compassion wanted from anyone she recruited.

"At present, until the innocent come to direct harm as a result of his and his minions' actions, there is a neutrality agreement between us. Until then, I will not war with my brother," Compassion further stated. "But I have the foresight to know that someone will come to harm if his response isn't tempered. At that point, the neutrality will be broken - and I'd like to have champions for the innocent when that happens. I won't force you to accept, but consider the following: he's interested in control, not destruction. But there are others who are keen to kill all that lives. Are you aware of someone within your family tree called 'Alma Balke'? She is one such being."

"I don't have a family," Astrid hissed. "So no, I haven't heard of whoever that is." Astrid was a kid untethered from the greater world as a whole. She was a passenger on a plane, overlooking millions of cars that drove across the ground in their day-to-day lives; A sun overlooking some twenty trillion miles of empty space, unconcerned with the way rocks erode or rain falls. Family, as a concept, was practically alien to someone who has gone past reality and into what was further ahead.

"I've never heard of her, and I'm not sure why she's relevant to your point with me. What am I supposed to do about her? Or your brother?" That name didn't sound familiar to Stareater in any way. At best, it just sounded like a drunken mockery of her own name.

"Whatever you are now, Stareater, you were born human," Compassion said. "The fact that you have never met any family doesn't change the fact that that they had existed. Born over seven centuries ago in what is now Norway, Alma Balke was a mother of two, with her elder child - a son - abroad when the Black Death spread across Europe. Carried to her country by ship, she, her husband, and her daughter fell ill. She recovered, and only she recovered. Driven to madness, she sought to conquer the forbidden powers of necromancy by traveling to destinations where it is said that even the Vanir and the Æsir were loathe to tread. She returned changed - she returned as a lich. Unknown to her, her eldest not only survived, but continued her bloodline. There are several that carry her ancestry - and you're among them. In her madness, she will kill and raise all life into undeath...because she feels everyone else must suffer along with her."

Compassion let the implication of the madwoman keen to kill all life on Earth sink in - it went without saying that, as distant as Astrid's relationship with Rose was, were this Lich Queen to succeed, even Rose would be killed and brought back a mindless corpse. That alone would make it personal, to say nothing of what it would mean for the broader world at large.

"She is known now as Skadi the Cruel - the Lich Queen," Compassion said. "While my brother may endanger innocents due to reckless zeal in his crusade to bring an unyielding order to the world, Skadi would happily slaughter them all, purely to resurrect them as part of her 'family'. Could you forgive yourself if you didn't act to preserve the innocent from my misguided brother, or if all life died because you and others did nothing to stop Skadi and destroy the one thing that still binds her to this world - her phylactery?"

"Or...perhaps you simply don't care, and I've misjudged you..."

”Do you care enough to stop them?” Stareater asked, agitated. ”You know enough about me that you can go back centuries, implying I’m related to a necromancies from centuries ago- Should I just assume you’re lying to push a point, or do you not know enough to stop her yourself? You and your brother have an understanding? Fine. You and this “Alma” don’t, allegedly.” The more Compassion spoke, the less her story added up. If she could see that far into Astrid’s past, why couldn’t she just stop the woman.

”I can’t be everywhere. But you can clearly teleport to places you need to be. What have you done to stop her. And why is it that I’m only just now hearing about the fact that I’m descended from a Lich?”

"No magic we've tried has been able to dispel the barrier on her phylactery," Compassion said, agitation also working its way into her tone. "Conventional methods have proven useless, as well. As for why you've only learned now, that's simple: any records that would have indicated that Alma Balke and Skadi the Cruel are one and the same don't exist. The only reason myself and the Seraphic Court know is due to my spymaster. Records of Alma Balke, the human the Lich Queen used to be, were destroyed in the chain of custody over three centuries, and the knowledge that she ever existed was lost. By the time Skadi became too far gone to influence from her madness, the barrier of her phylactery was up - the most we could do was attempt to contain her to the North Pole."

Compassion bluntly added, "Put differently, Whitespace energy has never been tried. In fact, we've never encountered it ourselves. And from what my spymaster has observed of you, it can de-atomize anything on contact. That makes you the best chance we currently have in destroying the phylactery and stopping the Lich Queen's madness. And even disregarding any blood ties that you might have with her, the very fact that these plans of hers are in motion should be enough."

Compassion shook her head, trying to calm herself down. "Look...I know this is a lot to throw at a teenager...a prodigy of science, on top of it, but they are the facts. Think it all over. If you're unwilling to help, we'll simply have to find other methods."

A quick look down at the outcropping later, and another portal appeared behind Compassion. It was the dead of night on the other side of the portal, with the skies filled with auroras. This makes little sense, since if this Sangay's location was consistent with that of the one in Moonshadow, the volcano would be nowhere near the poles, where the Northern Lights would be seen.

"I'm not a goddess, Stareater. Neither myself nor the Seraphic Court can be omnipresent - nor is our power limitless," Compassion said. "I have to travel through my own realm to get anywhere else. For millennia, I have been a guide for humans, not an active interventionist of human affairs - that was my brother's duty. But...perhaps you are right. Perhaps myself and the Court have been far too passive over the millennia. I'll leave you in peace. The choice as to whether you believe me is yours - you can follow me now, or call for me later. Unlike my brother, I won't coerce you in either direction."

Compassion would back up slowly into the portal to her realm in Moonshadow. Stareater would have approximately fifteen seconds to choose whether to join in. After those fifteen seconds were up, the portal would close.

Stareater was a person of science, not of magic. The world had scientific explanations for things, there were reasons for why things happened. But often when it came to magic, things happened just because they could. Souls, mana, magical power, these were things that didn't matter to her because Stareater did things through calculations and study. She worked through the measure of universes, not the abstract. Even places as untouched by the weight of physical law as the Whitespace had rules. And in the purview of science, there was curiosity. Someone, somewhere, had asked why things were they way they were, and got answers the hard way.

So, the prospect of answers being there and leaving stirred something in her. And with a frustrated scoff, the young hero walked through the portal to Moonshadow, following Compassion.

"I'm listening."

One of the very first things Astrid would notice while in Moonshadow was her energy levels were fluctuating around the halfway point on her gauge. Compassion wasn't actively doing anything. The entire realm felt...alive, in a way. To an extent, it was. Even when Compassion didn't command it to do anything, it was constantly changing - a representation of the ability of nature itself to be a force of not just destruction, but of creation.

"This is Moonshadow. This realm...it has never encountered the power you possess," Compassion trailed. "Your energy fluctuations are a reflex action by the realm itself - it doesn't know whether to fuel you or drain you at present. When I was first formed in this realm, Earth's biosphere and the collective consciousness of humanity had fully intersected. It is a metaphysical plane that is formed by the sum total of human thoughts and moral choices. Because morals and thought processes differ greatly from human to human, weather and erosion in this realm is highly unpredictable. When Earth is turbulent, so are these skies. When it is at peace, this place is calm. The closest related concepts you might be familiar with to explain this realm would be those of either the noosphere or the ideosphere."

The outcropping they stood on now was very much like the one Astrid carved out in real space, but the volcano was not only steeper, but inactive.

"You carving a place to rest manifested as a shooting star colliding here. It's part of how I knew where to look for you," Compassion explained. The stardust gown around her shifted, forming scaled armor and wings, both colored the same way as the earlier gown.

"Come, fly with me," Compassion said. "And don't fear running out of power."

With her flight, Compassion guided her over to a tundra biome. True to Compassion's word, Stareater's energy reserves did not fall below 50% - it's as if what was sustaining her wasn't energy from plasma, heat, or even electricity...if this truly was the closest thing to a noosphere or ideosphere, her reserves were being kept up by the mere psychic energy of human thought, as hard as that would be to believe. An eagle-eyed observer who knew Norway's geological landscape would be able to point out major landmarks.

Astrid felt neither fully charged in this realm, nor did she feel anywhere close to drained.

Where they landed looked to be in the middle of nowhere, but there was enough room in the area for a small village or even a large cottage to have stood.

"I'll summon my spymaster - I will need his archives to show you what happened," Compassion said.

This place felt strange. Stareater needed energy to live, her physical body would just give out if she couldn't stay charged up. The Whitespace was like a drain, always taking the things that pulled into it. She managed to float through there for trillions of lifetimes, yet now she wasn't truly there anymore. Not in the conventional sense, at least. Astrid Black was a lesson in the abstract, she was permanently stuck between to realities at once, never fully in one yet inexorably fused to both. Moonshadow was a strange place, to be sure. A place she wasn't familiar with, and she had already done enough world hopping for one life.

Even flying, she didn't feel that pull on what she had left. The blinding bright trail of Whitespace energy kicking behind her didn't behave any differently,. But she felt... Fine. It was odd.

She landed in the open area along with Moonshadow, looking around and not seeing much.

"Show me what happened?" She asked. "How long have you known?"

"It wasn't until recently, with her reemergence in Finland..." Compassion started. "...that we were able to piece it together fully."

From a flash of light, an angelic being descended from the firmament. He looked unusual, to say the least - a man with angelic wings clad in a combination of white robes and armor reminiscent of a Roman Centurion. He touched down before them, his sandals being an eyesore against the tundra terrain - still, he felt no cold around him. He bowed deeply.

"I have arrived as summoned, my Lady," the angel said. "What would you ask of me?"

"Astrid, this would be my spymaster, Caius," Compassion said. "He monitors events in all the realms, and is my eyes and ears, especially on Earth."

"I am Caius, of the Seraphic Court. A pleasure your acquaintance, Stareater," Caius said. "Clotho foretold that we would meet under circumstances like this. I understand you have questions."

"Indeed," Compassion said. "We need access to your archived observations of Alma Balke, and her later incarnation: Skadi the Cruel."

"At once, my Lady," Caius said. As he concentrated, many shards of what looked to be glass floated around him, each with a vision and audio of its own. A Norwegian woman, fair-haired and blue-eyed, appeared in one, the only survivor of three victims of the Black Death, embalming her husband and daughter to be preserved. In another, the woman, robed , going far to the north. Another shard showed desecrated Christian graveyards, followed by a finished ritual showing no woman, but a shriveled and floating corpse - like a draugr of Norse mythology.

Seven hundred years of the Lich Queen's history spread across mulitple glass shards - each one, a window to that point in time. Her efforts to resurrect her husband and daughter had failed. The pained wail that came out of that particular shard made even Compassion's blood run cold.

"If I must suffer this undying existence, then I’ll have all of the Living suffer with me!" Skadi declared in that vision.

"Once she reemerged in the abandoned village of Metsäjärvi and claimed to have blood relation with one of its survivors..." Caius started. "I redoubled my efforts to find all of her connections."

The image of Metsäjärvi in question had shown her taunting the assassin Inkwell with their purported blood connection, and Skadi seemed frighteningly eager to add Inkwell to be her right-hand woman of her undead armies. The mercenary White Glint killed Skadi in that village - but not permanently.

Going earlier in the timeline, during the cholera outbreaks in Spain - one of the supposed descendants had a copy of his family tree and saved texts of the occult. After a near-death experience with Skadi, who had been gathering those killed of cholera to add to her army of undead, the Spanish occultist burnt his texts on necromancy and systematically hunted for the other descendants and all mentions to Alma Balke in the genealogical records.

Each trace brought the blood connection closer and closer to the United States, where they split off among two major families: a homesteading family in the Southwestern United States, and a family in the provinces of Canada. This blood connection came not from Richard Black's side of the family, but from the mother.

In another person's shoes, Astrid might have been able to see the resemblance. Yet she had experience more time than anyone in history, meaning she had more or less forgotten what her own face looked like... Among other things. Watching the woman go through history the way she did though, she certainly seemed like Caius' display showed Alma Balke's entire lineage, up through the years until her descendants split. Some of them went to Canada, and Astrid apparently came from them. A woman she had never known, her mother, was a direct descendant of Alma.

If Astrid had known her mother, rather than have one single family member her entire life, would she have gone down a completely different road? Would she have been trusted with secrets of necromancy older than the modern world? Seven centuries right before her eyes, up until her birth, confirmed that the things Compassion was telling her happened to be true. This ethereal woman wasn't just putting on airs, Astrid really was related to an undying necromancer whose weakness was yet to be found.

She couldn't relate to what she had seen. Black Death aside, Stareater felt no ties to family the way Alma did. There wasn't anything worth saying, now or ever before in her life, that she could truly feel kinship with. She folded her arms up in front of her, thinking.

"...You need someone to undo what keeps her alive. Where is she?" Stareater asked finally. "How do I find this woman?"

"My Lady, I'm seeing something curious in the archive that I hadn't seen before," Caius said. Another window was practically a satellite view of the North American continent, with shooting stars that landed in both Canada, and one in the state of Texas. This was likely to show where the ancestry diverged. And then, 1862 came around - the middle of the American Civil War. Or, as Quickdraw himself would likely insist, the "War Between States".

April 6, 1862 - the Battle of Shiloh lasted two days. And in the vision was someone Compassion had already visited: David Crenshaw. While irrelevant to Astrid's personal life, it did add a layer of complexity to the family tree. Canadian Astrid Black and the American David Crenshaw were related - distantly so, but it would make both priority targets for Skadi to hunt down in a deranged quest to "reunite" as family.

"Quickdraw...a bounty hunter. Born 1836, and still alive to this day thanks to his ability to regenerate," Compassion clarified. "Like you, I extended an offer to join my Knighthood to him. He was...surprisingly accepting of my status as an avatar of good. But this vision; it's a new finding."

Crenshaw lived as an outlaw for several years before trying to go straight as a family man.

The rest of the visions into his life were ones Compassion had seen before: Crenshaw gunned down by an outlaw gang, only to get right back up as his Meta Gene activated, regenerating his body and speeding up his reflexes. It probably carried no emotional weight for Astrid, nor did Compassion expect it to. The two were separated by more than ten generations, after all.

"Therein lies the difficulty, Astrid," Compassion answered. "We know the general region she's in. Near the North Pole, well north of the Scandinavian countries. However, virtually nobody can navigate the magical blizzards in the area without getting lost. And even if they could, most mortals end up being flash-frozen if they enter the area. I doubt even Quickdraw could make it without being flash-frozen. The only observations we've been able to make before our own Knights were forced to pull back is that undead can enter and leave the region without consequence. What I would like to know before heading forward is how a region that would flash freeze a normal human would affect your energy reserves."

”Going there wouldn’t affect me any different than an ordinary person. But I still can’t go somewhere that cold for long,” Stareater explained. Places as cold as Canada or Norway were one thing, but the arctic was a whole other field of cold entirely. ”Assuming I didn’t freeze to death, it’d be next to impossible for me to have access to backup energy if my battery pack ran out or was damaged. I wouldn’t lose energy by being there, I’d just be flash frozen.”

Her harness was a tool for getting around things like this in emergency situations. It was a lifeline for her, for when Stareater went to cold places or places that were dark and didn’t exactly have indoor heating. ”If I had a way to tolerate that extreme cold, I’d still only have maybe two hours at most to search for someone.”