When Lyra had first mentioned she was gonna bring her friend with her today, Little John had been a little wary. He wouldn’t say paranoid, just sensibly cautious. He wasn't going to say she couldn't, because Lyra had said yesterday she was on a quest for her father, and she had the right to tell her friends about her own self if she chose, but he wasn't totally at ease with the idea.
Trying to bring someone into the fold could be a dangerous thing, one with, in Little John's experience, a few common outcomes. You could try and fail, creating a rift between you, and Little John figured that's what happened between Lyra and Rosario, albeit briefly. We’re not talking and I can’t live like that Lyra has said, but so many people he’d met in his long life had to, because time was, not so long ago, that telling other people this sort of truth could get you locked up or cast out, lobotomized, or a little further back, even killed. It was safer to learn to live with a secret, true as it might be, than risk the way the world’d treat you.
Success was a different kind of dangerous. The whole stare into the abyss and the abyss stares back into you warning; there were plenty of immortals about who didn't want mortals to know about them, plenty who were far enough removed from mortal ethics that they didn't give a shit about a body count, or a sanity count. Course, it went both ways. There were plenty of mortals out there who'd try to stake their claim on a little bit of magic; look at poor Clio.
So. Sensibly cautious.
And then Rosario who-believed-Lyra-now lay an arrow on the table, its flight so pale it almost shimmered. Thing've changed Lyra had said.
Right. So. With a low impressed whistle at the arrow, Little John sat down, reassessing the need for caution as he took a closer look at the craftsmanship. Only for the briefest of moments, though, because the tension vibrating off the girls took up more space in the room than an arrow. “Not so many, no. I take it this has something to do with how things have changed since last night?”
“Little bit,” Lyra agreed, with a curl of hair twisted around her fingers she was very very hard not to chew on. “Rosario saw some things last night– did you wanna tell them, Roz?– that was like, like some of the messed up shit we saw, in West Virginia. But not. Hers was way grosser. I mean,” Lyra bounced her hand on the table, not hard, but just enough to force herself straight to the point. “We want to know everything. Magical shit is going down around us both and we don’t know what the hell we’re dealing with."