"It also does not make sense for you to - stand look for bad things. We have to actually make progress on defeating the evil conspiracy. You do.... have a plan for that, right? Like what's the next steps on beating the queen?" 

"...run, not die. No can win a fight now with any thing that strong. If we not die, we get stronger."

Once Raoulin managed to slip away from mundane folk and find somewhere safe to turn invisible, it was not particularly difficult to track Iomedae and Haley. The soft earth and ploughed lines of the farmland make for very difficult terrain to move across without leaving footprints, and while it looks like Iomedae made some effort to cover her tracks (and it takes Raoulin a minute to pick up the trail again after a section where they moved along the road tarmac) it isn't difficult at all to track Haley.

He's been listening, very quietly, since Iomedae suggested waiting until tomorrow for food. 

Nicole's phone has been buzzing for a minute. When she next stops and pulls over, she checks; it's her knight.

She opens the texts with her phone angled just slightly away from Jenny and the screen just dark enough to make them hard to read, and is immediately glad for that long-term habit.

> OK. I just got here and they're discussing doing credit card fraud.

> They're in the barn of the farm at the corner of Spooner Lane and Meadows

> This is going to be one for the campfires 

> Haley is trying to explain unions. Squire, what have we discussed about unionising :p

> Wait a second

> DO NOT bring Jenny 

> Haley thinks the SCA is an evil conspiracy and wants to defeat the queen

Nicole raises a single delicate eyebrow and sighs deeply. 

Raoulin was surprised, to say the least, when he arrived to discover that Haley and Iomedae had snuck off to a barn to hide in a pile of hay and apparently debate the minimum wage.

He is significantly more surprised to learn that Haley thinks the queen is evil and Iomedae thinks they're going to die!

The confusing thing isn't that Iomedae thinks the queen is evil, really. Raoulin is no longer particularly inclined to expect Iomedae to believe things that make sense to him, since it hasn't really happened yet, and he hasn't gotten any wiser or smarter or worked any harder to understand her since their last conversation. The really confusing thing is that Haley, who as far as he knows has never been brought into the secret magical side of the SCA, seems to be fully on board with plotting a coup.

Can he ask Haley what the hell she's thinking? She hasn't been responding to texts. He'll try calling -

- his phone slips out of his fingers and hits the earth, making a very quiet but distinctive thud. 

Iomedae springs up and Detects Evil in that general direction. "Haley do you a knife -"

Something's there. Faint and weak, maybe first level. In the corner. 

He is getting far, far too old to be thinking things like 'oh, I don't need my full set of gear, I'll just grab what I need for tracking and go straight away, I don't want to waste time grabbing my luck artefact when I'm only looking for two teenage girls who don't know that invisibility exists'.

Moving is a bad idea, usually, if you think you've been spotted but you aren't yet totally sure; eyes are drawn to movement, and panic will give even an experienced stealth expert away. This is even more true if you're invisible. His humility power means people's eyes don't really want to look directly at him, don't find him interesting, settle instead on something nearby that is more important to look at than he is - but that's no use to him if instead people spot a plant that he's stepping on, or a door that he's opening, or a phone that he's stupidly dropping. People can still put it together from context clues and notice his existence, just like how they'll notice a humble person whose praises are only ever sung by others. 

Sir Raoulin Constant doesn't panic. But the phone is a dead giveaway, if either of them spot it.

So he keeps his feet absolutely still and, very slowly, bends over just enough to get his fingertip back on his phone. It immediately blends back into his invisibility. 

"What? I mean - I've got my feast gear -" 

"There is an evil there." She points in the direction of the evil. The problem is that no matter how uninteresting the source of that evil aura is the evil aura is definitely the most interesting thing if you are a baby paladin on the run from the law. "Not the Queen, a small one. I no have seen many evils and not know the English for the ones I know if I see them, but - not like a bigdog, that no would be evil. Maybe a small devil serve a evil magic conspiracy man. And small devils can be not seeable. I need knife, maybe have to fight."

How on Earth can Iomedae see him? 

Start from a place of humility. So she's better at magic than him, which is quite thoroughly unexpected, but implies that he shouldn't underestimate her capabilities. He doesn't want to fight her.

If she knows more about what's going on than him, the easiest way to find out what's going on will be to ask her. If she already knows where he is, there's no real downside. Nicole already knows where he is, so... 

Raoulin shrugs and, with a broad smile that he hopes looks relaxed and friendly, uncloaks. "I realise this is going to be quite unexpected, but I promise I can explain." 

For literally her entire life Haley has lived right beside the spotlight.

It's not that she can blame Aleksei. She tried out a fantasy LARP and quite liked it and invited him along, and then suddenly he was in the SCA and it was so much cooler and nerdier and tougher so she joined too. She's a mediocre musician and he's the up-and-coming bardic talent of central Atlantia. She's into graphic design and making little websites casually, just using her artistic skills to make a wordpress page look snazzy and professional for local restaurants or tradespeople, and he makes unspeakable amounts of money doing software engineering. He doesn't do it to attack her. He's just talented at everything he picks up, and she is talented... well, not at nothing. She's a wizard with clay in her hands, she makes pottery easily good enough to sell, but she doesn't want to spend her time at SCA events - her one escape from the boredom of mundane life - sitting behind a stall and persuading people to buy nice mugs from her. So she hangs out, socialises, volunteers, and gives away the mead she brews and the occasional clay tokens she makes.

She's a service monkey. It makes her feel useful, and wanted, and like it doesn't matter if she's overshadowed because she's still contributing. 

And it's not like she can blame Lucy, who rapidly became the new Girl Fighter when Haley started. So cool that Lucy could take on the boys and win! Very feminist of her! Haley, on the other hand, could take on the boys and acquire bruises in colours she didn't even know human skin ought to turn. Lucy was never once mean to her. If anything she did her absolute best to be an encouraging mentor figure. Haley still quit, which is on her, really, she thinks, for not having the fortitude. 

She's not mad at Iomedae, either, but she just finally arrived at the moment in her life where she gets to do something important - rescue a runaway from a terrible fate, overthrow an evil queen, defeat a secret conspiracy from another world - and she immediately discovered that Iomedae is the holy warrior, and she's, well, the sidekick. She apparently can't be a holy warrior and so that's that. Her role in saving the world is to take remote logo design gigs so that the Chosen One can afford to eat and hopefully survive long enough to get stronger and someday actually do something.

That makes sense, because if she's honest with herself she isn't a hero. Haley is a thoroughly average person - not very big, or strong, or fast, or all that smart, or rich, or magic, or lucky, or brave, or talented at music, or tough. 

But anyone can get one chance to matter, and decide to take it. 

Haley draws her blunt knife and her tiny fork. "Iomedae, RUN!"

And she charges Sir Raoulin.

You can't CHARGE WITH A KNIFE someone who is OFFERING TO TALK

You ALSO CAN'T let your only friend on the continent die for absolutely nothing when she is heroically trying to save you and you cannot betray her by tripping her as she charges by you (which she thinks about, but not fast enough, and which is what an Iomedae with three more years' life experience would have done without hesitating) -

Perhaps it was inadvisable and even altogether unwise of him to be visible. Raoulin shrugs back into his cloak of invisibility, stops thinking and trusts his feet. He's had a lifetime of escaping danger rapidly for his legs to learn their trade. His conscious mind doesn't think fast enough to remember that the barn wall is right behind him, but his unconscious won't back up into it, not after the time he broke his elbow tripping backwards over a hay bale at Pennsic. He sidesteps Haley neatly and watches her bounce off the wall and stumble onto her ass.

That would be mildly amusing if it wasn't for the continued presence of danger in the form of Iomedae, who can apparently see him.

Raoulin backs up to the doorway of the barn, hand on the latch. He's got no weapons on him and is unsure whether he was wrong when he expected not to need any. Is it more dangerous to open the door and let Haley know where he's standing, or leave it untouched and be stuck in the room with Iomedae?

He throws a quick glance at Iomedae, giving his instincts a second to assess her and make the call for him - 

"- Haley if we have kill him two on one better than Iomedae run Haley sword, but also no can kill a man because evil. A fiend, yes, not a man." She swings around as if she can indeed detect Raoulin. "Haley not a running away foster child," she addresses Raoulin. Haley a good woman of god. No hurt her."

- Raoulin concludes that he is not in immediate danger in the barn, and his natural curiosity outweighs his fear. 

"I'm not sure why you think I'm evil, but I have absolutely no intention of hurting either of you, though Haley, we're.... going to have to talk about credit card fraud."

"I think he's by the door now!" Haley shouts to Iomedae, trying to guess by the direction the sound of Raoulin's voice is coming from. She scrambles to her feet, fork in hand, and (after noticing Iomedae isn't running) tosses the knife to Iomedae. Her heart is beating so hard she almost thinks she might faint. 

"I not want to fight," Iomedae says steadily, picking up the knife. "If you try hurt me Haley, I fight. You evil, or have evil" she does not know the word for 'spell' or 'magic' - "thing with you or on you - maybe evil thing, because you not evil when we first meet. Holy warriors can see evil."...she shouldn't have told him that, he can dismiss the evil spell and then have the advantage of his invisibility again. That was stupid of her. But - but he said he wanted to talk -

Sometimes he's assuming that other people are smarter than him as a conscious practice of humility, but he's kind of aware that they're not actually, it's just a lens he uses to guide him towards being kinder and away from being careless. He struggled with humility when he thought it was all about making himself small, but it doesn't have to be; it can be about thinking that you're smart and others are geniuses rather than calling yourself dumb, or about thinking that you're doing your best but recognising when other people around you are being absolute saints. It's a pleasant sort of mindset to be in, always looking for the good in other people, shining light on their best traits, lifting them up rather than putting yourself down. 

And other times people actually are just significantly more knowledgeable than he would've ever thought to give them credit for, even with his conscious attempts to give everyone at least a little bit more credit than he thinks is justified. 

"I have a few magic objects. I'm not certain which one would be the evil one to you, but if it wasn't on me when we first met, I have a guess." 

He reaches into his pocket and withdraws an ancient-looking piece of seaglass, worn perfectly smooth by the sea, with a dull blue light within it. "Is this the evil?"