Amber opened her eyes and saw the crystal throne room. That wasn't a surprise now. She had been here most weeks since she was first introduced to the Rainbow Knights, and sometimes she was here night after night. The first thing she did was look around the room, looking for the different coloured glows that represented her friends. They weren't always in the same seats, especially if they'd been moving around as they talked, but the colours were distinct enough that she could recognise them right away.

It looked like they had a full house today, five different coloured lights in the darkness before the room's own illumination kicked in.

"What's up?" Mel was the first to ask, "Found anything?"

"Another dream," Arnie answered before Jack had a chance, "Might be one like yours. Can you check?"

"Okay. Tell us about it. I can tell better while you talk, so we might as well go through it in depth. If it's just a dream, or a fake one, I'll tell you when I know."

"Right," Arnie nodded, then stood there thinking for a few minutes.

"Maybe start with your name?" Jack prompted, "You remember it?"

"Urdia. Lord Urdia. I think it might have been short for something, I just don't know. It's weird, I remember I was a guy back then. When I woke up, it took me a few minutes before I realised what was different. It's just... weird."

"It changes every time," Alex shrugged, "Gender may as well be a random factor, a fifty fifty chance. If ethnicity isn't preserved between reincarnations, there's no reason to assume gender would. I believe that in our original incarnations, when this started, we may have all been male."

A faint sound got Amber's attention. She turned her head to the left, and thought Violet was about to speak. But the girl didn't say anything, and Arnie was eager to carry on once she'd got started.

"Okay, right, I was this Urdia guy. And I was kneeling there the whole time. The Princess was right in front of me, and I didn't see her at all. She was telling me... begging, really. She said stop bowing, we'd been through so much together, we're supposed to be friends. And I just answered like a book of protocol, saying the things that tradition says you're allowed to say to the Princess. I hated myself for it, I knew it was upsetting her that she couldn't confide in me."

"There must have been some reason," Jack said, "We can't judge these people by our standards. Maybe that was what was expected of you back then. We've got this romantic ideal of a Princess as beautiful and proud and... I don't know what. But in medieval times, I know the royals couldn't be people because they had some duty to the country. Maybe it was the same, and you had to stand on protocol. Don't judge your past self by what you would have done."

"No, that's not it. I hated myself for doing it. Like, this Lord Urdia. He hated himself for doing this, it took all the willpower he had. It's like they were talking in euphemisms the whole time, I don't know if I understood it right. But it was like, the Princess neglected her duties because she was in love. Demons invaded the world while she wasn't paying attention, and I felt like treating her as this untouchable noble was the only way to get her to do her job again. Like, it was all of us? We gave the Princess the cold shoulder because she'd put her feelings for us in front of her destiny. And we had to remind her that she isn't allowed to have friends, or feelings, or any kind of a life. Like, she's got the whole of Pangea on her shoulders, and if she takes time out to be human, there's nobody else."

"That's terrible," Amber whispered.

"I know. Lord Urdia knew it too. But he did it anyway, I did it anyway, because it was the only way to keep the world safe."

"That's..." Amber didn't know what she could say.

"What would you have done?" Violet asked. "We're too young to think about this, we're just kids. But that's a hard question even for the adults. Imagine if you could see your best friend crying every day, and you know that if you say something to cheer her up, the monsters will win. Could you do it?"

They all thought about that for a moment. Amber was pretty sure that none of them could have made the right choice if that happened. She wasn't even sure that there was a right choice, and in the long silence she could imagine that all of the others were thinking exactly the same thing.

"We have to make sure it doesn't come to that," Jack eventually said. "There must be a way to fight these monsters. Maybe we take them out while the Enemy's still weak, or we cut off whatever gives them a chance to enter this world, or we help the Princess do her thing somehow, so her friends have got her back and she can still save the world. I won't believe that there's no third option here. We're doing all this to bring the Princess back, and I'm not going to do that and then treat her like a slave."

"There has to be another way," Alex nodded. "Throughout medieval Europe, kings and queens were treated as different from the common man. They had to preserve the royal bloodline, and all these conditions that we'd never accept today. But today's monarchs don't have the weight of the world on their shoulders, because they've got governments to take up the slack. If we'd just helped her with her duties, instead of punishing her for the slightest slip, then maybe..."

"We don't know that," Jack said, "I know it's harsh, but we're still flying blind here. We can hope all we want, and you can be damn sure we're going to try everything we can. But I'm also pretty sure that changing destiny won't be easy. Even more than just finding the Princess, changing this will take everything we've got."

* * *

When there was a monster on the news, it was like the whole world stopped. Amber and Mom were in town again, and until she glanced at TV screen Amber had been skipping along delighted. Today was a shopping trip, Mom had said, but she'd seen that they were taking bags with them, and Mom was carrying both their swimming costumes. Amber guessed that they were going to the water park, but she knew that Mom would be feeling tired before they even got there if she was running around bouncing up and down as she looked forward to it. Visits to the water park were always supposed to be a surprise, but Amber knew Mom wouldn't mind too much about a guess as long as she kept quiet.

Parking the car at the water park was a different matter. Mom would use the words "nightmare" and "king's ransom" almost any time she mentioned it, so they'd parked in the Churchill Arcade and started a short walk through the arcade, down the street, under the big bridge, and into the park's main entrance. It was their usual plan when they went to the park now, and Amber knew that normally they would be passing the bridges and the big glass buildings at the museum before she realised where they were going.

So she was dancing a little, and doing her best to pretend she didn't know, so that Mom wouldn't be frazzled before they arrived. But she stopped suddenly as they passed Mason's, the big 'Never Never' shop in the arcade that sold computers and televisions and guitars. There were a couple of really big TVs in the window, the kind of gaudy display that was designed to grab your attention and not let go. Amber didn't pay attention to the neon cardboard stars proclaiming the prices of the hardware on display, or the features, or how cheaply you could get them over some mystery number of weeks. But she stopped right away when she saw one news reader talking about monsters, with the text at the bottom of the screen talking about deaths in the Austrian Alps.

It was a long way away, but she still had to know. If a monster had appeared, then it was in a way her responsibility.