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Timekeeper     Lilian is the only one who can escape from the unflinching progression of time that follows after Schneider, and even she can just delay it. For everyone else, the echo of that final gunshot is swallowed up by the jazz and shouting of the masked humans, like the starter pistol that lets them begin celebrating. Schneider's body is taken away, as part of the message Forget Me Not has for the Elites, a carriage is dispatched for Tamamo.

    Even Arcana has other places to be. After everything, this is when Lilian's wrists and lap are released from their bondage, as Arcana, seemingly satisfied with Vertin's initiation and Lilian's acquiescence, leaves the Walden as ambiguously as she arrived. Like strands of molasses, the black oily monsters and masks that remain imply the shape of her absence, the atmosphere permanently changed to suit her.

    Vertin has her jacket back on. Visible above the table where she's seated, what remains of Schneider is a red-cooling-brown stain soaked into the lace of her cravat and the shirt under it, and the tacky blood drying on her nails. Once Schneider was carried down into the labyrinth by a helmeted Manus servant, she stopped having much to say, though she's been anything but unresponsive to the world around her.

    Plenty of others have more than enough to fill the air in her place. The esoteric collective of arcanists rejoins Forget Me Not at the table for the main course, as an endless parade of servants brings bloody rare steak topped with rosemary, watercress soups, glistening fish served over potato puree, lavish plates of vegetables arranged so precariously that it feels wrong to touch them. The crab-faced man, looking shorter and wearing a different suit than before; Lyra, now much more eagerly talkative if still moody; the four foot tall patchwork elephant doll, who doesn't seem to eat but clingily follows along with the conversation; and of course Forget Me Not himself.

    The centerpiece of the table, as a joke that Forget Me Not seems to have made personally, is an entire gold bar, trussed up and garnished as if it's a luxury cut of meat. He's been having to get up from the table repeatedly, coming back harried and short, but the overall tone is one of unrepentent celebration and welcoming. There's as much wine as any diner could want, and Forget Me Not himself has partaken in plenty. Vertin hasn't touched her food, and in his tipsy state, Forget Me Not is all too happy to point that out.

"Miss Vertin doesn't seem to have much of an appetite. What a pity. I'd have thought that crackshot of yours would have worked up a sweat."

    Rather than rising to his bait, Vertin's eyes are on the centerpiece of the table, past her empty plate. "... So the Storm Syndrome this time is the consumption of gold and precious materials. How horrible."

    "'Syndrome', you call it? I see the Foundation is so pleased with the society of old that this state is merely a 'syndrome'. But this pernicious habit has long rotted away at this era; only now is it plain to see even for your blinded eyes."

    Lyra is kicking her feet restlessly, having her minions cut her steak into tiny pieces before putting it in her mouth. "Honestly, you. Must you make such a production of everything? If Nazdravan and Cozonac have even a scratch on them after your performance with that dead girl, I'll have you strung from the ceiling. My poor babies, out among those barbarians."

    The Lady in the Painting has a brush-wand levitating in front of her, dotting at her canvas to paint what could be loosely interpreted as the pomegranate-marinade pork on her place. She asides to Druvis, with a vague concillatory tone as if talking while doing her makeup. "Oh, don't look so down, dear. Any other way it might have happened would have been less beautiful."
Lilian Rook     Arcana taking her leave is the moment that Lilian can finally breathe again. She tries to believe that she stopped when Schneider did, and that's it's the sting of gunpowder and iron settling on her tongue in place of the bated-breath rainstorm that followed Arcana which jolted her back into the habit. She doesn't try for very long. The first sign of life she shows after the act is a single lonely shiver, rising from her rapidly cooling lap. The wave of compulsive skirt-smoothing that follows doesn't rid her of the feeling at all; it only excuses her eyes away from the scene until there's nothing left to look at.

    Even counting Vertin, too. No matter how many times Lilian looks over at her, no words come to her at all. There are fragmentary pieces of sentimentality; motes of guilt, sympathy, frustration, and worry, swirlingly chaotically around in her head; but none of them can find any traction. Scored by the controlled chaos of the Walden, all of her thoughts compete with such similar volume that everything she tries to think of just turns to muddy noise in her head.

    On her eleventh try at saying something, Lilian hesitantly lifts a hand towards the Timekeeper, and reaches out as if to take hers, only to twitch to a stop and gravitate towards her shoulder instead, and even then only to pause a half-second later. Then Lilian's fingers slowly curl up into a closed fist, and her hand falls gingerly back down to her side instead.

    She had meant to ask Vertin how she feels. To diagnose any lingering effects of what just happened to her. Perhaps even probe her for whether that was really all an act, and Vertin decided to do the brutally practical thing with her back against the wall. In the end, Lilian says instead "Is there any way I can help?", and she only just barely says it at all. The atmosphere is so heavy that those few words feel as though they squeeze all the air from her chest. A part of her is tempted to kick out chair and pace around the building like a raving lunatic until she stops thinking about it, but she only has to look left and right from the table once to subtly shrink back towards it.

    The rest of the Manus Vindictae returning to the table is such a relief that Lilian's traitorous nerves force a rattled breath out of her to signal it. The lines drawn by the arrangement of the room couldn't possibly be any more clear. Where she and Vertin are, there is food, drink, company, and safety; from the Storm and everything else. Stray a little further, and even under the very same roof, and only the seething digestive juices of Chicago are to be found; the thing Manus Vindictae calls 'humans', whipped into a frenzy from metabolizing such richly miserable death.

    The sense of alienation from Vertin that she feels now is clear enough by her drinking, even if Lilian wouldn't admit it. With her hands free, her position clear, her message sent, and with no hope of anything better than that, a half-formed 'keeping her strength up' transforms into Lilian taking such a natural place at the table that it's as if she were invited. Even if her mood is far from upbeat, her abnormal appetite can carry her deep enough into her cups to make up for it before long.

    'Miss Vertin doesn't seem to have much of an appetite. What a pity. I'd have thought that crackshot of yours would have worked up a sweat.'

    Over the side of her third glass, Lilian stares at Vertin, considers how far she wants to keep jabbing Forget Me Not over pushing her buttons, and falls fall short of a firm defense. "Come off it. Does she look like she's ever had much of an appetite?"
Lilian Rook     '... So the Storm Syndrome this time is the consumption of gold and precious materials. How horrible.'

    "Not to go grading evils, but I almost miss the last one now." she says, ostensibly by way of sympathy. It's ruined by the way she nervously touches her hairpin a second later. "To think they robbed the Sothebies blind just to choke on it a few hours later."

    'But this pernicious habit has long rotted away at this era; only now is it plain to see even for your blinded eyes.'

    Lilian frowns but her eyes rise to meet Forget Me Not's, rather than look away. "Anything that disrupts the orderly operations of the status quo is a 'syndrome', isn't it? Regardless of the intent in calling that, it's rather ironically on-tone." she says, politely neutral-bitter. "For how grotesquely heavy-handed the cosmic satire is, that it's still invisible to them is a little . . ." She twirls her knife suggestively rather than finish her sentence, then returns it to another cut of steak.

    'If Nazdravan and Cozonac have even a scratch on them after your performance with that dead girl, I'll have you strung from the ceiling. My poor babies, out among those barbarians.'

    Lyra is a new presence. Manus Vindictae, welcome at the table, inoffensive-looking, and currently not implicated directly in Schneider's murder. She and the others present a similar outlet for Lilian the moment they return. "Oh, they all have names?" Lilian says impulsively, pausing with her fork nearly to her mouth, and an expression of innocent interest on her face; on that she quashes back down with difficulty. "I appreciate what you're doing. I'll find a way to make it up to you later if something happens." she says. Of course, Lilian mostly intends to stay in good with the person responsible for retrieving Tamamo, but . . . "I mean it. It's a personal principle of mine."

    The painting lady, meanwhile, is just visually fascinating all on her own. Lilian tries to keep her staring polite, but there's a limit. Her hands are only just ceasing to shake on her cutlery, after all.

    "Ah, speaking of names, I suppose I'm the guest today." Lilian clears her throat, puts down her fork again, braces herself with another sip from her glass, and says, "Dame Commander Lilian Isabelle Rook. Of course Lilian or Mrs. Rook are fine. We'll be . . . sheltering together? For a while. I'm afraid I don't know how formal the occasion is." Looking around again, Lilian glances down at herself, twists her neck and shoulder to glance herself over, and sighs. "My blouse is still somewhere in the cellar, so I suppose it's a lost cause anyways."

    Lilian shoves aside an intrusive thought of her only Foundation white attire lying ink-stained in a dark corner while she sits at this table in mostly black, grey, and gold. "May I know the names of those I'm dining with?" she says. "If we're to wait out the Storm together here, I wouldn't think it too presumptuous to ask."
Ein The show was not long enough for her to ask 'why' fully before it was over. In the aftermath, Druvis III sits in a dull respite, having taken just enough items to smear her plate with the gore of eating without having really ate. Picking at her food like a scab, she worries enough for appearance and then gives up - had given up, before thunder had barked in the dining room.

Now she sits, indoor with a Storm outside, and fails to make eye contact with those that fuss at her or speak to her.

Forget Me Not tries. He succeeds, largely, in the way an old cat might naturally trust 'the one person' despite their mood souring socially, but the metaphor doesn't hold, fully.

This is the place, the people among which Druvis III has friends!
    Had friends. Before one was executed.
        Could she exclude the rest?

. . . 'The Manus will only ever cannibalize its own members in your pursuit of purity, just as you've done with Schneider.' . . .

When would the day come where, since what she spoke was English, and not Welsh, her purity would fail? When would the day come, because her mother burned the scrolls before she read them, that she would be called to know what was on such fragile and silent paper and not be able to answer?

When would her parent's abandoning of the ways reflect on her? Wasn't that such a far-minded thought? Did she expect to live so drearily long?

Like this?

- - -

Druvis dissociates through a full course of food and finds only water as the wine flows. She had eaten purposefully and easily when Schneider had brought her a simple picnic, and now with all the fineries and a garnished gold centerpiece at the Walden she had barely an appetite to spare the finest final feast of the era. Given long enough with her thoughts the throb in her ears finally subsides, and her eyes slide to the woman in the painting as she's addressed.

'Any other way it might have happened would have been less beautiful.'

Druvis swallows, dry.

"I'm sorry," She begins, voice cracking across the hook of her comma and breaking into a question mark. "I haven't yet accepted the premise." She 'admits', closing eye and exhaling with a hang of her head, hand raising to wave palm. "She's not supposed to lose duels." Is added, almost eulogizing, and then Druvis reaches forward to pick up her wineglass as an excuse to not keep going,

    but she doesn't drink.

'Ah, speaking of names, I suppose I'm the guest today.'

It's Lilian that Druvis doesn't know how to even address. She's present, yes, and more to the point eating animatedly. Clearly the newest member, and certainly at minimum 'peer' if Arcana was that drapingly claiming...

"You may call me... Druvis." She states, weighing 'the third' or 'Weyerhauser' both and discarding them as the Era twisted around them. Looking with eye-and-a-half, her voice rasps around the corners that joy would smooth and neutrality would at least turn about. "As formal as a funeral, though Forget Me Not perhaps prefers a wake in grandness."
Lilian Rook     'I haven't yet accepted the premise. She's not supposed to lose duels.'

    There is a numb and leaden silence from Lilian, in a space sized and shaped for a flinch. Whatever nerves are those that feel that this specific kind of pain, they've already been scraped too raw to feel any variation in the sting. That Schneider's death hurt this stranger as well, even inside of the Manus, piles grief onto grief and gives acceptable form and face to what Lilian wishes she could say, but to allow herself to feel it deeply enough to do so, she would first have to endure the thought that it was Vertin who killed her, and the space it would take in her heart is currently being used just to hold her knife and fork steady.

    "I don't much like gunfights." Lilian says, monotone on the verge of robotic. "They're random, harrowing things, where no one can keep their dignity for long." Even she isn't fully clear what she means to communicate by saying so; if anything at all. Her plate empties on its own. "If there's going to be another Walden, it'd be properly done with swords."

    'You may call me... Druvis.'

    "A pleasure." Lilian says, equally flat and forced. The affect thaws effortfully over the seconds after, creaking as if from a pine freeze. "I've heard a few things about you." she says next. Forced small talk. "Vertin did her research." Even that meaningless social motion springs leaks before long. "I'm certain you've heard it a million times before, but still, I'm sorry for what happened to your land. I suppose it'll be another era soon all the same, but . . ." Lilian pauses to chew thoughtfully on that tangled thought, and then wash it down with Forget Me Not's house special of stars. "I had the rare privilege of growing up surrounded  by forests. So I hope you at least got the one who did it in the end."
Timekeeper "Is there any way I can help?"

    Vertin's current distaste for speech and food hasn't made her dully unresponsive, as might be assumed at first glance. She's quietly coiled up like a spring, watching the food and where it emerges from the shadows in the hands of servants, watching the other Manus and listening to every word. A keen eye could diagnose her as 'shaken', and notice the tension that bubbles into nausea with the smell of food, but she's as twitchy as a rabbit to not miss anything.

    Her reply comes unhesitatingly, and no more readable in its tone. "Yes. I'd like you to stay with me."

"Come off it. Does she look like she's ever had much of an appetite?"

    Forget Me Not chuckles, and seems to take that as enough of a win that he doesn't need to press any harder. He returns to his meal, carving away at some small pickled eggs over salad. "That's true. It seems that something about being a bureaucrat wastes away at your soul. Perhaps Miss Vertin will hit a growth spurt in our Manus, however long she lasts."

    Vertin takes this somewhat-cooperative bullying as impenetrably as she takes everything, and stares at Lilian for a few seconds with an unreadable expression. After a bit, she says perfectly evenly while plating some fish for herself, "I suppose we'll see. Thank you for your hospitality."

"... Hmmph."

"To think they robbed the Sothebies blind just to choke on it a few hours later."

    Vertin looks around, but there isn't even any water being offered to her to wash down any of her food. She's forced to settle for wine instead, sipping at it minimally to clear her throat to speak.

    Bleakly realistic, "Mr. Karson and the rest would have likely succumbed even quicker to Storm Syndrome and gorged themselves on the manor's riches if they remained surrounded by it. There's no moral sense to make of any of it. The Storm is cruelty for no reason."

"Oh, they all have names?"

    "Yes, yes." Lyra seems a little impatient with the question, like it's beneath her, but it's not so far beneath her that she's not excited to talk about her beloved pets. "My two dear little Nightmares."

    Since Lilian didn't exactly step outside to behold the marvelous creatures, Lyra unclips a long wood-and-ivory flute made by Druvis's hand, and jabs the sharp end of it into the side of the head of one of her helmeted attendants. The ensuing black goo spills out into her palm, and then is sliced a dozen times in an instant by a violin-screech of wind, shaping it into a simulacrum of the goopy skeletal horses pulling the carriage. The shriek of wind was the first note of a strange little tune Lyra continues to hum to herself, poking and prodding until she's satisfied with the precise representation of her horse.

    "Now, that's Nazdravan. He's cleverer than his sister, but she's quite a bit faster and more precise with her jumps. But don't be mistaken, neither of them are mere *draught* horses. They would run circles around the measly little butlers Lord Forget Me Not afforded. Why, they would carry that beloved of yours to us across the ocean if that's what I asked of them." Praise her horses!!
Timekeeper "May I know the names of those I'm dining with?"

    "Taira." The gruff and slightly bubbly response comes out of the crab-faced man immediately, though it sounds oddly higher pitched than when Lilian overheard him talking earlier. He's got a scratchy southern Japanese accent, despite the skin under the crab looking American-standard-white. "Don't worry about the dress code. I'll bet you've got the knack for it."

    "Oh, yes, it's Lyra. That's Lie-ra, so don't forget that. Welcome to the Manus, both of you. Behave yourselves and don't cause a mess and there won't be any trouble at all." Despite the trappings of comfort, the entire room is a mess. Which one of those mistakes does she think Schneider made?

    "Hhhuh?" The big elephant plushie, sitting at the far end of the table, has to be prompted by a sharp kick from Lyra to realize that he's being referred to too. His big flat hands press up to his face, then he clumsily waves. "Oh. Uh, you can call me Hypothetik, Mrs. Rook. I was just looking at that dead girl and thinking about what the Guiding One said."

"What did she say?"

"Ah, that was before you-- a while ago, she said that from now on, death for us is-- ah-"

    Hypothetik is prodded again, this time from the opposite side by Taira. "Quiet. If Lady Arcana informs them, she informs them. That's not our role, Lord Hypothetik."

    "Mmmm~" Rather than introducing herself, the lady in the painting hums dazedly at Lilian. Her floating paintbrush draws across Lilian's exposed shoulderblades, feeling soft and warm like a fingertip, and when it comes away, the bristles are dyed with the exact shade of gold of her tattoo. "You're so beautiful, dear. Who made you?"

    "You may refer to her as 'the Lady', Lady Rook," Forget Me Not smoothly supplies, drinking in the sheer intoxicating luxury of so many arcanists gathered at last. "She has no name besides that. Now, a toast, to our new union?"

    Vertin raises up her glass, and adds at the least awkward moment to do so, "And I'm Vertin." It doesn't really work. The adoring welcome that Arcana gave Vertin isn't shared by any of her apostles, it seems, and least of all Forget Me Not. None of them particularly want to engage with the awkward unhappiness clouding around her or Druvis, though in the latter's case, Forget Me Not still wants her to be roped in.

"And what did Lady Arcana want from you, exactly?"
"I'm not sure."
"But you do have something about you..."
"Do I?"
"You have that incantation."
"It's a language."
"A language? But from where?"
"Nowhere."

    Vertin's short answers leave her looking out of breath, straining with the effort. She's oscillating between that malaise and exhaustion, and the same heady feeling as Forget Me Not, and the scale just barely tips far enough for her to blurt out more. "It doesn't match any that I've researched. The Foundation denied that it existed at all."
Timekeeper "She's not supposed to lose duels."

    The Lady titters sympathetically, angles and edges in her cubist landscape tilting back and forth. "Ah, but therein lies the art, darling. One dies the same way one lives; isn't that what Lady Arcana's Storm teaches us? Those... how do you say, 'pernicious habits'? Losing was preordained, only the colors involved would change."

    The dissociative rift that Vertin keeps dancing around before flinching away has claimed Druvis entirely. She hovers between that numb void and Lilian's chatter and charisma, unable to commit to either, and electrified by a third axis that makes her terrified to stray too far from either. The crack in Druvis's voice lurches Vertin into motion, desperate to try and reach for her again.

    "She didn't," is a statement that only Druvis can hopefully, hopefully, understand on its own. Vertin follows it up a second later, as if it's a continuation of the thought rather than a new one. "That was an execution. There wasn't any art, or irony, to it. Glamourizing an end only trivializes what came before it."

    Unfortunately, Vertin's deflection from her coded message to Druvis has the additional effect of summoning the attention of one of the carousing humans. He sways around the table, loitering between servants and snickering drunkenly to himself, with the mask over his eyes occasionally dripping one black line down his cheek.

    "Heyyyy, if that wasn't a duel, then we're all off the hook for that thirty thousand to one payout, huh? That's keen, real keen. Thanks for that one, sport! Hahahaha!" As if the entire intervening hours hadn't happened, he and his buddies hoot at each other about that stroke of utterly trivial good luck, before he spots Lilian at the table too.

    "Hold on a cotton-picking minute... ain't that the ornery dame from earlier? Yeah, it is! Damn, she's a hell of a sight prettier when she's not mad enough to spit! Ha!" To make his point, he hawks and spits on the ground.

    "Well, lookit you. One billion odds on us versus one," He's not brave enough to repeat Lilian's use of 'degenerate', but his mind easily substitutes a replacement. "Broad waving a pistol, and now here you are, sitting pretty in the Manus's base. Looks like you've gotta make us whole, sweet cheeks."
Ein For the amount of food she's eating, for the great portion of the feast she indulged in, Lilian's empty statement of gunfights--

--of doing so wearing a gun, threatening with it--

--seem almost comedy to finish with the indulgence of duels at all. Yet Lilian snaps like a flag in tempest weather, changing direction with force as she shuts down in grief(?) at Schneider's death (but not the human's) and yet eats heavily off their plate and decides swords would be better as if surely the problem could be solved by *her* arcanum.

"As for the Walden, it remains." Druvis rolls down her ashen neutrality on whether the Walden would change. There's a resignation to it, a sarcasm, where she had made the wands to settle it and still she hated the sound of their most featherlight invocation of thunder.

'Vertin did her research.'

"She made map of my forest to find me, it seemed. Dressed in familiar blue, shoe-catcher, she was more obliging then." Druvis speaks of their first meeting, and leans head to fix with eyes, bramble-masked and not. It is,

Extremely unfortunate the next few questions Lilian asks Druvis. A one-two punch of wince-portrait hidden only halfwise by broken mask rendering her honest.

'I'm certain you've heard it a million times before, but still, I'm sorry for what happened to your land.'

Every piece of information that Druvis had received of Lilian Rook, down to her name and title and reaction made her speak to the new and special type of outsider - someone from outside even more than 'Arcanist', and in this there was a traitorous note of innocence that seemed curious in the moment it revealed itself.

"Do you come from a kinder world, Ms. Rook? You seem so familiar, that the way you ask questions," A beat, for thought, how to phrase it. The words don't work right, don't hook in well, and it comes out garbled in a predictable way, questioning with a need-to-know hook. Was she right?

"You're still too kind, aren't you?" She asks, and then realizes how she phrased it but doesn't correct. The twist of her face, and the turn-away of her revealed cheek tells more than enough.

She had come to the words automatically, but they were too harsh. And then,

'So I hope you at least got the one who did it in the end.'

Druvis's absent expression, looking to the Lady, dips down, and she turns to Vertin -- to Lilian, and then the humans beyond them, lurking around the table.

"Too kind to people, and the world." Druvis continues, orphaned in beat, but it takes her a moment to even slide it out.

'Praise her horses!!'

Of everyone, it is the fainted friend of Druvis that also speaks in praise of the exemplary goop-honse. "If the duels at this Walden were races, then you could raise champions too and all would know."

She raises her glass to toast, and if it is to horses alone with a cup of water, at least she does so.

"Welcome, Vertin. You've taken a hard route, from before the forest and through it. Will you rest?"

'Losing was preordained, only the colors involved would change.'

Druvis' head rolls when she shrugs. "Duels have winners and losers. What of it?" She returns, about to lift more, if she can summon it, offput by the Lady despite affinity and inspiration, and in turn it is Vertin who cuts in.

'That was an execution.'

The preaching causes the same rolling reaction, and it's visible through her the deep whole-body eyeroll into action, a sotto "I know." slipped in immediately. Reaction to coded message, or just deeply unwell reaction to stimuli, there's a bite of it just because of how fresh the trauma is for her, and there is another bite from a new direction.
Ein 'ain't that the ornery dame from earlier?'

Druvis knows if she stands for this, she will not tolerate a string cut stop again. Like a demon blade ready to unsheathe and needing to taste blood to be returned, Druvis III had fully rationalized the killing before her and was already at determining starting speed. It would be simple, and direct, and deeply cathartic in the moment, and then after, she would either bear it, or she would become it, and she did not like the person past that line. She had resisted that more than she had resisted dying. Would she become their monster to prove a point?

Wasn't she already?

"Bet that you can collect on whatever your delusion is and take your step forward." Druwvis threatens the crowd from a full sit, winged cane wand with crescent moon aglow in lap. She wants this to stop, and tested a third time, it's hard to face it with the same resolve as first.
Lilian Rook     'Do you come from a kinder world, Ms. Rook?'

    Even the prelude feels like a sucker punch; only glancing from bone for its unconsidered angle. Still wobbly in her place at the table, Lilian chooses to receive the implication as a threat, and bristles at it accordingly. "I don't believe in the world having kindness or cruelty in it." she says, at first only to buffer space, on honest impulse, then sharpen the topic amongst peers. "Those are qualities of people, not nature. If my world has done me a kindness then it was by showing me fewer of them than most."

    'You're still too kind, aren't you?'

    Lilian was braced for purity testing. An imminent, ruthlessly impatient measuring of comparitive trauma, meant to settle a pecking order immediately through the door; to challenge the place that she would need to hold for Vertin to stay through the length of the night. Still in the midst of inventory on her own feelings, between gauging how much she can set aside sympathy for Druvis and if she can bear any further denuding after Forget Me Not's assault, the dizzying pivot from premise to conclusion catches her where she she hasn't any thoughts put in place at all.

    It renders her stunned, then speechless, then strangely angry. Quietly balling her fists, Lilian says "Kindness isn't something you just lose at some point when you grow out of it.", ready on-cue as the flustered amateur raring to argue that she is more than hard enough at heart.

    'Too kind to people, and the world.'

    "'Kind' is something that you fight the whole entire world plus yourself to be, every single day, knowing that it'll never get you anything. Don't insult the people who still want to keep trying with 'still'."

    'Yes. I'd like you to stay with me.'

    At a moment of queasy-aching tension, the speed with which Vertin replies takes Lilian off guard before the simplicity of the request. Her first instinct is to brace, done more physically than it needs to be, as is her usual way; that the words aren't a rebuke of any kind visibly sinks in seconds later. Wide-eyed and still-chested from the prolonged beat of stress, Lilian processes with a series of feathery blinks that Vertin is still, somehow, keeping herself together in all of this, and so she breathes deep, says "Beg pardon. That was rude of me." to Druvis, and then lingers on Vertin until the words finally come.

    ". . . Is that all?" she says. Her shoulders move in a way that suggests nervous laughter, but it never materializes. Her eyes wander back to her drink, which she takes a double round of, to better endure the tension of still talking to her. She lets slip a whispered 'fuck' as she swallows it down, momentarily reeling from her own pace. "Then it should go without saying. I did give you my word, didn't I? 'When thou speak from authority absolute'." Contemplating for a while why Vertin would ask that, Lilian frowns to herself, and forces something like confidence into her voice. "I've nearly got my strength back. Don't worry."

    Eating seems to be part of it. Despite her decidedly blueblooded table manners, Lilian's dietary quirks are an open secret that is even less guarded than usual under the circumstances. More than just the calories, though, of which she has burned far more than Vertin, who has subjectively eaten more recently as well, half the purpose of it appears to be bombarding herself with aesthetic sensation as a grounding exercise; to occupy all of her senses until the cloudy post-traumatic uncertainty starts to drain out of her. There is a measurable increase to the clarity of her gaze and the certainty behind her voice as she goes, battling back the condition of severe delirium she had awoken in.
Lilian Rook     'That's true. It seems that something about being a bureaucrat wastes away at your soul. Perhaps Miss Vertin will hit a growth spurt in our Manus, however long she lasts.'

    "It's all the time indoors." Lilian says, like obvious wisdom. "Or rather, it's measuring your days by workload rather than 'the progression of time', staring at forms and seldom seeing the sun. It makes you forget when you're tired and hungry." The last part puts a frown on her lips, but she pushes it back with an irritable twitch; for her gracious host. "Bureaucrat or not, she's an arcanist, isn't she? Compared to the slavedrivers at the Foundation, I'd like to imagine that she'll do well enough when naturalized by her own kind." It's as politely as she can phrase it. The effect is mitigated by the frustrated noise she makes afterwards.

    "Though, I've been known to be possessed of an incorrigible addiction to rehabilitating the sorts who give up parts of themselves to cling to the one that no one likes. So perhaps that's only my vainglorious little complex speaking." Lilian says, stifling momentary self-loathing with another plate. Tense as she is, the effects of choosing the abundant coping mechanisms of a speakeasy aren't to be underestimated.

    'Mr. Karson and the rest would have likely succumbed even quicker to Storm Syndrome and gorged themselves on the manor's riches if they remained surrounded by it. There's no moral sense to make of any of it. The Storm is cruelty for no reason.'

    Lilian's expression flickers morose. "I suppose that's the silver lining." she says, partially missing the point. "He seemed like an uncommonly decent man." She seems content to leave it that, working her way through a side of eggs, then changes her mind. "Most of life is cruelty for no reason, I suppose. There's no sense looking for God in the fact that it fell evenly on everyone this time, instead of running through the Gwendoylns and Bellwhistles like disposable fuses."

    'Yes, yes. My two dear little Nightmares.'

    Unfortunately, 'a table full of arcanists' is somewhere Lilian has yearned to be for longer than she could put a name to it. Long before her ill-fortuned visit to Chicago; before the Ainsworth office; before Vertin caught her casting those lingering stares the Walden's VIP balcony; the shape of the place she wanted to be had been chipped into her heart with every day she spent with Sonetto, Matilda, Regulus, the arcanists of Laplace and the orphans of the Suitcase. The reserved, restless energy she always has when it comes to things like this-- about the Bouanich tradition and Medicine Pocket's papers and the new friends Vertin seems to make everywhere she goes-- is anything but subtle; rather than being stifled by the circumstances, it boils over from a place where thoughts of her safety and her career had once kept a heavy lid on top.

    When the evil little vampire girl starts using a Manus bone wand to make dripping black sculptures of her undead horses for reference, Lilian wears the look of a woman coming up for air.

    "Oh my goodness. Beg pardon, but are they a type of 'Critter', or are they your creations? Rather, are they 'tamed' or your familiars? I've never actually seen them before, but-- Oh would you believe me if I said I was terribly fond of horses as a child? I used to daydream about riding around the countryside all the time . . . But it's terribly difficult to even find ordinary horses where I'm from nowadays, much less anything like those two, but I'd always imagined there must be a special sort of connection, you know? Are those two your favourites? How long have they been with you? Are they how you traveled here? That'd be incredible if they were! The Foundation just uses that horrid little teleportation chamber for everything."
Lilian Rook     'Taira.'

    "Ah-!" Lilian breaks from her fawning attention on Lyra to acknowledge the others in the room. Quickly trying to make sense of the reponse she'd gotten, she idly goes to bite her thumbnail, realizes she's still wearing her gloves, and hurriedly removes them. Despite colour coordinating her nails with her lipstick, the callouses on her fingers are particular. "Well now, I'll certainly do my best to prove you right." she says, in a state of mind to be put at ease just by an accent. "If I'd known it would be like this, I'd have just worn my 'disguise' from last time." Lilian giggles quietly, then sighs less so.

    "I hope you'll be able to stay until Tamamo arrives. She's been wondering about home for ages, and no one seems prepared to answer her. It might help ease her in, if you'd be up for it?" Lilian says, fretful on multiple axes. "I'm fluent, if that would help it along. Five years." The fact that she can't even see the man's face appears stunningly irrelevant. 'A Japanese arcanist' feels too auspicious for all the creepy incongruencies to matter. "Are you descended from the clan? Or it is a poetic pseudonym of sorts? Ah, no one's yet stopped to explain why arcanists take them on so often."

    'Oh, yes, it's Lyra. That's Lie-ra, so don't forget that. Welcome to the Manus, both of you. Behave yourselves and don't cause a mess and there won't be any trouble at all.'

    Lilian slams back her drink with a little more enthusiasm, and says, "Charmed~" with a little more than that. Her plan was only to keep the Manus occupied until the Storm is over, but the way all of these total strangers, who were supposed to be her enemies, are being so nice to her is . . .

    Like a drug. A dizzying surge of fresh oxytocin follows every new name in. By the time that Schneider obliquely comes up again, the impact is blunted by so much neurochemical morphine that Lilian doesn't even process it.

    'Oh. Uh, you can call me Hypothetik, Mrs. Rook. I was just looking at that dead girl and thinking about what the Guiding One said.'

    "Oh my. That's an interesting choice." she says, conversational about 'presumed choice in names' as favourite accessories. "Would it be tacky to assume that you're considered to be a bit of an intellectual by habit? If it is, well, all of the Awakened I've met have been so clever that I can't help but see it, sorry~!" The flush creeping up to her face is clearly incited by her first decent meal in close to two subjective days and the staggeringly strong alcohol. The unsettling, almost feverish tinge to the way she obsesses over these simple introductions, is harder to place. One would think she's never gone around the table like this in her life.

    'What did she say?'
    'a while ago, she said that from now on, death for us is-- ah-'
    'Quiet. If Lady Arcana informs them, she informs them. That's not our role, Lord Hypothetik.'

    "Oh, I've no intent to pry." Lilian says in sudden haste, raising her hands gently. "But anything you'd like to share, I--" She glances at Vertin, too quickly to be easy to understand why. "Beg pardon. It's just so seldom that anyone ever volunteers their thoughts on the grand questions, you know?"

    The way Lilian twitches alert from the paintbrush in much the same way as she would at someone invading her personal bubble. She hadn't reacted to the tool itself like a person, but the touch itself jolted her just like someone's fingers would.

    'You're so beautiful, dear. Who made you?'

    "O-oh. That's . . . I mean . . ." Lilian presses her fist to her cheek, chewing her lip about an answer so simple that the only thing to get hung up on at all is how to find a way to say 'my parents' without being condescending.

    "Such a complicated question." says Lilian.
Lilian Rook     She finishes off the rest of her glass in a hurry, looks around for who to call for another, and experiences such a strange upwelling of irrepressible energy that she decides to snap her fingers instead. She holds the newly filled glass by the stalk as she speaks.

    "I did. Everything but the black hair and green eyes." Once an invisible tipping line in the energy of the room is crossed, the answer comes to her automatically, and she speaks it with strange fervidity. "How should I describe it? 'A work of iterative restoration, using an unfinishable piece as a base, achieved over twelve years with cyclical application destructive and reconstructive techniques using rare blood as a base pigment, in parallel of the Hermetic Magnum Opus and paying homage to the bandruí solar rites', perhaps?" Lilian laughs, nervous-tipsy in her enthusiasm; perhaps even 'bashful'.

    "I'm getting carried away with myself aren't I? But I really do mean every word of it. The curse of art is that once you can see the flaws in your design, the act of correcting them sharpens your skills, and as a result, you're beset by a new, more beautiful vision than before, right? And the more you sharpen your eyes, the more beauty you begin to see still clinging to life in the cracks of the world; and then you can't help but want to cut away the weeds and see it grow! Once you learn that God's work can be revised, it's impossible to stop."

    Even if she hadn't been brushed, she would know the exact shade on the bristles by heart. The Lady's admiration of Tamamo's handiwork works the same on her as always. "But all the gold is my wife's touch~" she says, almost dozing from the attention. "When that beautiful truth grew so bright that I overflowed myself, she filled in the cracks with that colour so that I'd never have to discard it." Taken in so overwhelmingly by the metaphor, Lilian wades coy step further in. "If you mean 'Lilian, too', though, that answer would take all night."

    'Now, a toast, to our new union?'

    There exists not even the slightest contradiction in her mind between 'staying with Vertin from hereon' and 'being part of Manus Vindictae'. That much is apparent by the ease with which she raises her drink and the sheer elan of her "To our new union!", much less her enthusiastic choice to clink glasses with Vertin as soon as she's introduced herself. Why should there be, after all? Despite tensions, Vertin has already formally pledged her allegiance. From Lilian's perspective, the most important way to help her right now is to make sure that her acquaintances like Vertin as much as they seem to like her.

    'It doesn't match any that I've researched. The Foundation denied that it existed at all.'

    And what easier way? Like this, at Manus Vindictae's table, even Vertin, the arcanist with no arcanum, can make Lilian's eyes sparkle in that way. "You're kidding!" she gasps, fingers splayed over her mouth. "There's an entire magic language that only you can speak-- beg pardon-- you and Lady Arcana, and those imbeciles just left you to research it on your own?" Lilian scoots her chair closer to Vertin, and plants her palm down just an inch short of her thigh.

    "Vertin that's incredible! There could be an entire ancient system of magic using that language for all we know! Do you think that's why Lady Arcana singled you out? Do you think she can teach you?! Even if it's only the Suitcase, just imagine what else it might be capable of!"
Lilian Rook     To Lilian, the Suitcase is as a part of Vertin, barely any less integral to her personhood than Sonetto's poetry or Regulus' rock music. Like this, at Manus Vindictae's table, its history as a hand-me-down of the Foundation, left to Vertin only by default, is washed clean, ready to be exalted as a manifest miracle of Vertin's will to brave Storm instead. That she would be ecstatic on Vertin's behalf is unquestionable. She was quietly infatuated with the Suitcase from the very beginning, after all. And all it needed was to be torn from the Foundation's hateful bureaucracy and placed in Arcana's presence for mere minutes to be invested with limitless meaning and potential.

    There is no avoiding the 'click'. The dizzying high where it all makes sense takes Lilian to clasping Vertin's hand in both her own and squeezing it over the table. Shining radiantly with 'it's going to be alright', she gasps out in genuine, uncomplicated joy, "Oh my goodness! All of your arcane skills are so-- . . . so stunning!"

    So why is it that the happier she looks, the more off-kilter everything about her feels? Why is it that neither alcohol nor praise nor kinship can explain what exactly she is so drunk on? It's like she's sick.

    'Damn, she's a hell of a sight prettier when she's not mad enough to spit! Ha!'

    The sound of the man's voice is enough to wipe the joy from her face, but the sound of him spitting is what scrapes the answer beneath it. In the fraction of a second that hangs between recognition and response, where Lilian's pulse spikes to a hundred and twenty in Vertin's hand, just faster than the saccade that turns them away, Lilian's eyes fall all the way through Vertin's face and stop seeing her there at all.

    'Well, lookit you. One billion odds on us versus one broad waving a pistol, and now here you are, sitting pretty in the Manus's base.'

    Lilian appear to have no idea what he's talking about.

    Even though she turns from Vertin as if everything else in the room had disappeared, and fixes her undivided scorn on the stranger and his friends, there is an eerie, confused kind of blankness to her expression. She was reminded too recently of her prior vitriolic outburst, so she couldn't have forgotten about it, nor could she not know who he is, if the steady drift of her fingers to the pendant resting at her neck is any sign, yet Lilian stares at the man with all tense, misgiving air of someone being accosted on the street by a lunatic raving at her in tongues; as if he might be dragged away at any time.

    'Looks like you've gotta make us whole, sweet cheeks.'

    Then it clicks. The exact moment can be timed to Lilian snapping the chain of her neck and bolting upright from her seat.

    Knocking over the chair doesn't help; even on her feet, she's still the smallest one in the crowd, and after such a sudden movement she has to fight against vertigo and exhaustion to stay standing. If she intended to dismiss him, going dead quiet was the worst thing she could possibly do. Even reacting at all was a bad idea.
Lilian Rook     But anyone with a brain can see she isn't thinking about any of that at all. For a little while, a magic circle was drawn around the table of Manus Vindictae; one that required no incantation, yet separated those inside from those outside of it with sacred, ironclad lines; and for a little while, Lilian was inside of it and the men that she hates were banished. Sharing that circle with Vertin and Forget Me Not and Lyra and Taira and Hypothetik and the Lady had been like heroin. The man who came here to remind her that he, too, is 'Manus Vindictae', who joined before she did, with no resistance, to drag her outside that line again and take her place inside, is worse than withdrawal.

    When Lilian realizes that he and his are demanding her submission, even 'scorn' loses all purchase on her face. The feeling that overcomes her is too white-hot, too chaotic, too volatile to call any one thing at all. All that she knows is that she still remembers what it was like to have been the weakest person in the room, and that the one thing that always, always works to get her through any situation is sheer, mad dog--

    'Bet that you can collect on whatever your delusion is and take your step forward.'

    Lilian snaps out of something that doesn't have a name. A horrid sort of burningly unwell glow dims out of her eyes. She looks to Druvis, quivering with unspent energy. She drinks in her stance of opposition, notes its direction, then eases out half her held breath. Scanning every other member of the table at a glance, Lilian says, with merely experimental vitriol, "You've had your fun, now go sit in the corner, pig. My wife will be here any minute, and it'd be best if she didn't see you."
Timekeeper "Don't insult the people who still want to keep trying with 'still'."

    Forget Me Not is raptly engaged in the back and forth between Lilian and Druvis, sitting patiently in his chair at the table that's apart from the two of theirs. Like introducing two skittish cats to each other, he's avoiding interfering in the dialogue between the arcanists too much, but Lilian's retort gives him just the chance to slip in.

    Fingers laced under his chin, Forget Me Not's head tilts slightly to the side. "But the people who try to be kind, they aren't the ones still making it difficult. And so, the world wins twice; first by debasing its best, second by being repaid gently. Far better to be kind once the debt is erased, isn't it?"

". . . Is that all?"

    Vertin's thin smile in return reminds her of a certain someone. "It's all that matters."

"Dressed in familiar blue, shoe-catcher, she was more obliging then."

    Vertin nods silently at the recollection of that first trip through Druvis's woods. The knowledge that Druvis is Manus, now, and the way Vertin must have come across back then... she would like to believe that the implicit deception matters little to the feelings they shared with each other in the moment. There's less black in her outfit now, but still that same blue that drew Druvis's eye in the woods, affixed to her neck like a promise that she always meant to end up here.

    "I was glad to meet you in your woods, then. Less so again beneath them. But I still wonder, Miss Druvis... is the sound you waited so long to hear, rainfall?"

"Compared to the slavedrivers at the Foundation, I'd like to imagine that she'll do well enough when naturalized by her own kind."

    While Forget Me Not is emanating a constant stream of 'yes queen you're so right' at Lilian, Vertin bristles with genuine unhappiness at something in Lilian's defense of her: not the insult to the Foundation, as might be expected, but at the rest.

    But as is Vertin's way, when she's actually bothered, she starts with a statement so broad that it takes a bit to narrow down her point. "The St. Pavlov Foundation is home to many arcanists. More than the Manus Vindictae, or anywhere else, for that matter."

    Forget Me Not cattily rolls his eyes, but Vertin evenly bulldozes forwards without giving him the chance to speak. "And despite the human centricity of the Foundation, they're still irrepressibly arcanists. They don't stop counting just because of their workplace." She takes a breath to slow herself down, the finishes more quietly, "And I've spared them as much of my attention as I could afford. We all live however we can."

    Without Arcana around, though, Forget Me Not's tolerance for Vertin's soapboxing is practically nonexistent. He scowls and makes a gesture, and one of the burly helmeted waiters backhands Vertin across the head, sending her toppling off her chair and her hat skittering across the ground. She grunts with pain and finds her feet again, averting her eyes as she retrieves her hat takes her seat back at the table.

    "A word of advice, Miss Vertin. Lose those pitiable sympathies to your former leash-holders quickly, or else you may find your loyalty questioned more often than your health can take. Arcanist or not, anyone supporting the dominion of humanity is responsible for their cruelties and depravities. Is that understood?"

    Vertin wipes a trickle of blood away where she bit her lip. "It is." Neither she nor any of the other arcanists at the table seem particularly surprised by the sudden flare up of violence, and none bother to bring it up again.
Timekeeper "Beg pardon, but are they a type of 'Critter', or are they your creations?"

    "'Critters'?" Lyra repeats with a little snicker, like she's never heard the word before. "Clearly not. What else could such magnificent beasts be but perfect ideals straight from the Archive of Imagery? I retrieved their forms from the Depths of Myth shortly after meeting the Guiding One."

    A little confused, but mostly contemptful, she waggles her flute again to scatter the mini-horse into black droplets on the magical breeze before stowing it away again. "A 'chamber'? How would they teleport without the wind?"

"I'm fluent, if that would help it along. Five years."

    Taira chuckles to himself, and switches to Japanese to murmur something either about being curious about meeting the legendary kitsune, or being in love with a hawk. His dialect and accent is a little hard for Lilian to grasp at conversational speed, with how trimmed-down the Japan of her world is. He seems the least willing of anyone to rattle off information about himself when prompted by the newcomer, even if he's apparently in a pleasant mood.

    "Every arcanist worth noticing is a descendent of somewhere." And on the topic of names, he taps a fingernail against the rim of his glass. "And why should we take a human name at all? When the Storm comes, this bar will no longer be owned by anyone known as 'Lawrence Cavendish'."

    Circling back around to Lilian's complaint about gunfights to talk about the Walden's future, Forget Me Not waves his hand irritatedly at Taira before turning to her. "Ah, but of course the Walden will continue to exist. It will adapt to the times, but I hope it'll please your senses just as well. For Lady Druvis's sake, I would like it to become... somewhat more subdued, but isolating from humanity will require capital."

"If it is, well, all of the Awakened I've met have been so clever that I can't help but see it, sorry~!"

    "Huh?" A little flustered, the plushie scratches his big flat hand on the back of his head. "Oh, you're really nice...? I don't know. I'm not sure about that kind of thing. Are you...?"

    Vertin surreptitiously slides her hand under the view of the table to tap Lilian sharply on the leg, in a warning sort of way. Her eyes are fixated on an empty spot in the air between Hypothetik and Lilian, which is the only indication she gives as to what she's uneasy about. Pivoting topics, she instead asks, "Pardon me, but you're not an Awakened, are you?"

    Hypothetik jumps in his chair, startled and increasingly uncomfortable, but that emotion started before Vertin said anything to him at all. His trunk wiggles and he has no response besides stammering, but the Lady in the Painting coos in vague interest towards Vertin.

    "Ooh... what a cute little trick, cutie. What else do you see?" Her brush, where it floats over to stroke the gouged cloth in Vertin's shirt much as she did with Lilian, comes away red and limned with a faint florescent glow.

"Once you learn that God's work can be revised, it's impossible to stop."

    The Lady is delighted by Lilian's outpouring of appreciation for the afflatus, giggling breathily while the shapes of the background of her canvas warp and ripple. "Oh, yes, yes! Lady Arcana's fondness for music is something, but I've just always had the belief that transformation is best embodied in the *visual*! You're just a delight of a transitory piece, love. But I must ask; why shy away from the beauty that overflowed from within you?"

    Vertin, about some unspecified part of Lilian's explanation, murmurs while watching her, "Somehow, I still find myself underestimating you."
Timekeeper "There's an entire magic language that only you can speak-- beg pardon-- you and Lady Arcana, and those imbeciles just left you to research it on your own?"

    Despite her discomfort in the Walden and the awkwardness between her and the other Manus, Vertin can actually be drawn in by this topic in exactly the way Lilian wants. She twists her wrist ambiguously, wine sloshing inside her glass after the toast. "That would be the most generous way to put it. More accurately, they wanted me to not research it at all."

    "I've always been aware that the Foundation had secrets it would like to keep from me. I have memories of my mother as well, but the Foundation insists that no such person exists, and that I was abandoned at the SPDM as an infant. If Arcana tells me anything, it will be more than I've ever known."

    Lyra leans forwards in interest, chin planted on her fist. "'Suitcase'? That battered old thing?"

    It's still next to Forget Me Not, held hostage for Vertin's disobedience. Lyra's comment draws everyone's attention to it, and the queasy desperation that tinges Vertin's face with it being out of her grasp-- too similar to Lilian's panic without Night Mist-- can't pass without notice anymore. Forget Me Not rolls his eyes again, but without a word spoken, he's outvoted, and shoves it across the table for Vertin to take back, and it immediately goes back into her lap.

    "Yes. It opens into another world." Vertin pauses, considering repeating the incantation and showing it off, but it catches in her throat. Some of her friends are in that manor at this very moment, caught there just as the Storm is approaching. "... One whose peace is unchallenged by the laws of this world."

"You've taken a hard route, from before the forest and through it. Will you rest?"

    Vertin lightly taps her fork to her plate, where she's only eaten a small portion of her food, then sets it down. "I've been encouraged to, but I find it difficult to relax. How about you? Are you satisfied enough to stay still?"

    With her free hand, she reaches out to touch the blackened branch in the center of the table, drooping in its vase to brush the top of the mocking gold bar steak like the tree above Tantalus's head. "This branch... it should have come from one of your rowan trees, correct? Rowans are symbols of protection and vitality, stubbornly staying alive in any number of environments. In the most dangerous days in the Celtic calendar, people would wear garlands and berries of rowan to pray for its blessing for vitality."

    A smear of soot comes away on her finger. "But in America, a fire swept through and destroyed them all. There's no sense to it. Just like the madness of the Storm that spreads through Chicago, the kindling is given no thought by the fire."

    "But as long as they can, people will struggle to stay alive. They will lie and fight, and hide away for a chance at survival, clinging to hope that the disaster will pass someday so that they can flourish once more. As long as a fragment of life remains, the future can someday be filled with it."

    The charred branch, the withered buds on its tips, the dry vase without soil or water-- Vertin tips a bud with her finger, as if her sight shows her where a flower might still become. "Isn't this branch still alive, Miss Druvis? You've used arcanum to keep it at the moment when it was burned."
Timekeeper     "Quiet! You've gone on long enough!" Forget Me Not, irritated, slaps his hands against the table, and Vertin withdraws. Smoothly sliding into Druvis's attention in her place, he steeples his fingers together and smiles at her.

    "My lady, the Guiding One has given instructions on how to handle the humans clamoring outside our walls, and I believe that it will please you. We will attend to them soon, and She will perform the ritual to seal your woods off from the Storm, letting them stand untouched as a monument to your righteousness and pain. What was yours and should always have been yours, will be untouched by another for the rest of time."

"Bet that you can collect on whatever your delusion is and take your step forward."

    "Step forward? Lady, I'm waiting right here!" The man folds his hands behind his head, leaning back against nothing. The presumed-invincible smile on his face remains unchanged, supported in particle by particle by the milling hordes of humans and unquestioned belief in the sanctity of gambling.

    "You know we're all Manus now too, right? We're brothers in arms! Mr. Me-Not'll have our backs! A promise is a promise, and he's always been a real upright sorta fellow when it comes to payouts. Ain't that right, boss?"

    He's still blabbering as Forget Me Not slowly raises up a hand that cuts him off. "Look, maybe the broad can't pay, but we're an understanding bunch. I'm sure we can find some other-- hrkk--!"

    He doubles over, suddenly cramping with severe pain that paralyzes him. Forget Me Not strolls over with a stony expression, grabs his hair where he kneels, and yanks his face upright for Lilian to see. "No, I think not. I believe we disagree about where my 'uprightness' lands, wretch."

    The grimace of anger on his face is only barely masking bloodthirsty glee, and a crawling sort of expectant reassurance when he looks at Lilian. "My lady, you don't need to tolerate the offenses of humanity in our company. They are your lessers. Now, what would you make of this foul reprobate, who still believes himself appointed by the old world?"
Ein The initial question, seeking, wondering in the almost-innocent way someone can looking at the stars and then asking a space explorer - an alien, yet alike enough to ask, as journiers often are - 'what is it like out there' comes with an honest interest even in the tinderdry wonder Druvis can evoke. Lilian is braced for something else, though, and the initial reaction pauses Druvis.

"Nature, too, can be kind." She speaks, convinced of a truth that she hears and knows. "The world is its... collection of parts, and some are harsher than others."

Considering, still, Lilian's insistence, she comes to the offered conclusion:

"No, then. It didn't. I think..." A beat, and she reaches for glass, stopping at table, fingers curling over edge. "Kindness has its context."

She rests on her point and moves to drink, partaking of water as her wine and sipping to space as much as satisfy, and returns glass to table with a slow motion of arm. Lillian is taken completely by the pivot of her thought and Druvis gives her all the time she silently asks of and more.

Anger is one that Druvis wasn't expecting, but as Lilian presses and Druvis absorbs with faint turn of mask as she listens more but looks less, it's not unreasonable. 'I'm hard' isn't even out of pocket, but without being in the mindset of purity testing - in that way - in the first place, she needs her own moment to re-adjust.

The air of the Manus' table brought out what little socialization there was in Druvis, like when she sat besides Gwendolyn Sotheby and heard all that there was to hear about a most incredible stuffed rabbit without presumption or pre-emption, split from the tables of man but free to speak or listen or find joy in something of the self. Art they were proud of. Her best attempt at a 'so, where are you from?' was woefully short of social, and she had expected. . .

. . . better, than the world as it was. Couldn't there be a world that was impossibly better? It proved that it was possible, if the arrangement of stars and chance could be convinced to follow through.

'Kindness isn't something you just lose at some point when you grow out of it.'
'Don't insult the people who still want to keep trying with 'still'.'

". . ." Druvis opens her mouth, and then closes it, and doesn't have something to say to that directly. She lands on, "At least, you're still 'kind'. Well,"

Reciting a useful fact like a ward, she creaks through a wistful "Kindness can earn the loyalty of crows and ravens." and falls to quiet as the tabletalk shifts.

'Most of life is cruelty for no reason, I suppose.'

Even a cat whose day has been a dirty tumble of misfortune can still look the faintest bit smug, eyes lidded, with the air of a feather in her teeth. "The world Is, but life can be cruel in general or specific?" Druvis asks, working at the point like a fingernail worked into a crack to worry it open.

'...instead of running through the Gwendoylns and Bellwhistles like disposable fuses.'

"No kinder a world then ours, then." Druvis answers her own question, sotto voice for herself, on Lilian. Knowing that she's motioning... surly, unsettled, she lulls in her seat and lets the conversation move without hitching and hanging and setting claws down on each topic to stretch and be known in her sharp mood to draw sweet blood and attention back to her. It's about nightmares, and the dreams of ideas, and how the 'apostles' may be beyond death in a way now, and...
Ein 'Now, a toast, to our new union?'

Startled, Druvis III had almost been fully lulled to quiet, content in-moment to settle into the folds of the tablecloth and sounds of arcanum being discussed. It is Lilian, up with joy, that draws the slow rise of Druvis III as well, stretching as she does to take a half-crossed arm pose of resuming regality, lifting priorly-untouched glass of wine to join. Her shift of it, full, sloshes against the sides and kisses the rim with wine, brought to meet with Lilian's first in a kind of wonder and turning to the Lady besides to gently tap glass to wand-brush. Drinking after, the strongly acidically floral note makes Druvis' nostrils flare and only gamely does she finish swallowing, though she does manage to not shame herself with a coughing fit. Instead, hiding a clearing of the throat as she sits, she returns to nursing her drink - yet now it is her wineglass. She did not often toast - did not often find the table drawing - but Forget Me Not was at least one of her favorites, and their guests seemed to join them.

She takes another drink, toasting the wake for her forest, and their world, and a gulp for poor Gwendolyn lost in the rain, while Lilian flutters around the topics much more brightly. Lilian, who strives in her newness and endears just by earnestness, who clearly wants, and Druvis knows the question of hers to ask.

"And yours?" She begins, low, and drinks again to clear throat with a burn. "Is the sword part of your arcane skill, or, your wand?" She asks, having a particular interest in implement and medium. Normally, she would be inspired by the wandless new members of the Manus, but seeing Lilian finger her pendant and proudly speak to her armament in such a way gave the wandmaker the impression of having found such already. And so,

Well, she had to ask!

'But I still wonder, Miss Druvis... is the sound you waited so long to hear, rainfall?'

Druvis creaks in posture as well as voice, uncertain in the face of the question. "I... don't know. After so long, the sound is new, but is it what I've waited for? Or is it just a sound that brings change?"

Is it healing to reverse? Did growth happen backward?

Did it happen, stopped in time?

'This branch... it should have come from one of your rowan trees, correct?'

Druvis nods, head lolling, not looking directly at branch or Vertin. She didn't like touching it, yet it was touched. She didn't like the dirtying of things, and yet they dirtied, sooting the hand and smearing time-struck ash into cloth. "There's no sense to it." She agrees, echoing Vertin's observation, but a slant of her eye-and-a-half accuses. "But whether or not it is indulged in is the choice." The 'pernicious habit', the obsession with stocks, even the enjoyment of the duels and bloodsport and betting, it was endemic to the era in a way that was different than fire finding kindling. Caught on the cusp of saying something, she is interrogated again.

'Isn't this branch still alive, Miss Druvis?'

Tonight made lie of anything she'd say beginning 'no'. Of her, and the forest, it was clear.

"Roots remain." She answers, gentle-creaking, but,

'You've used arcanum to keep it at the moment when it was burned.'

She's not allowed an escape from the truth. Soon, it wouldn't matter, but the truth was... She had used her arcanum for Schneider, too, in every way, to freeze the moment longer.

"I have." She answers, and counts a second regret, or perhaps etches the lines of the first more firmly, and Forget Me Not is there. He speaks, and there's such a righteousness there. He uses the word, and she feels so distant from it. "How late of me, to find now a taste for people walking them."
Ein And then,

Humans. Chicago.

Lilian is up - standing, unwell, and her string doesn't cut quickly. Druvis finds a purpose to stand herself, pushing up out of seat several beats after, first regal in sit-up and stretch then bowed only in the sleepy way she looks at the chair, thoughtful. Her eye and a half flick up, locking on the mass of jeering men, and in the fullest consideration of 'bending down' before their sight, draws wand up by lifting hand to guide it, conducting winged cane up to shine with moonlight glow, and--

...small roots push up, a branching construct unfurling under the chair to lever it up and give Druvis the ability to slide it closer with a gentle sweep of the hand. Her other continues to raise, holding the invoking instrument raised for several moments after returning Lilian her chair.

"They circle, seeing us dip heads to drink, and they think it is their privilege and purpose to circle and select." Druvis observes blunt and low to Lilian. "They pick at the weak and see if the group allows it. Mm," She drops to a note of derision, and summarizes. "This does not earn the loyalty of birds." She informs, and sets her wand down with the lowering of her hand.

No matter the decision that Lilian makes, to indulge Forget Me Not or not, as the man who doubles over in illness is quickly also beset with the flap of wings. A corvid, slipping through into the Walden's halls from among the infiltration of forest features into the speakeasy among the cracks and crevasses, belligerently goes beak and claw down into the nauseous catcaller, flapping and immiserating the already poisoned individual.

Druvis sits, at this, her familiar-like friendly raven's presence (attacking local unkind idiots) a calming thing for her. Exemplary, when it finally finishes with the man or is driven off, the raven sweeps to perch at the top of Druvis' chair and preen.
Lilian Rook     'And so, the world wins twice; first by debasing its best, second by being repaid gently. Far better to be kind once the debt is erased, isn't it?'

    Lilian isn't oblivious to Forget Me Not's agenda when it comes to Druvis and herself; he's polite and patient about it, not subtle. It predisposes her towards neither unkindness nor suspicion, however. What she sees isn't dissimilar enough to what she believes he sees too.

    Druvis is a countrywoman of theirs, estranged, bitter, lost at sea; one who realizes she is welcome at the campfire but finds the heat closer than its edge too uncomfortable. Forget Me Not is a countryman of hers, and now Lilian's as well, who is shunned by America remembering it better than Druvis. In his way, he tries to meet Druvis where she is, welcoming her into both his place in the Manus and her place in her own homeland. That he's seized upon her own, proud, 'Irishness of neglect', is for Druvis' sake just as much as it is for his. She can't find fault in that kind of motive at all.

    "I've done my grappling with that truth, believe me." Lilian says, smooth and prim, like the way she raises another glass to her lips for the break. "Society is poisonous even to itself. Slowly but surely, day by day, the countless little sins of humanity build up in its bloodstream, and must be purged. But without the will to correct itself, society designates vessels into which it pours all of that toxic byproduct of its blind cruelty, assigning them the blame for the 'cost of business' that everyone else profits from. Then, when one of those vessels begins to overflow, they're quickly and efficiently purged; before the venom bubbles up to poison anyone important."

    "I've considered writing a thesis." she says, turning over her hand at the wrist nonchalantly. "But even if it's only sharing the toxins around, I want to respect the sort of kindness that means to keep even just one more vessel of sin from being purged."

    'The world is its... collection of parts, and some are harsher than others.'

    "Even if the parts are blameless, someone is responsible for collecting them." Lilian says; uneasy, but short of a sigh.

    'Kindness can earn the loyalty of crows and ravens.'

    Lilian watches Druvis with evident interest. Taking her time to wonder at her meaning gives her partner in conversation plenty of it to find her thoughts.

    'The world Is, but life can be cruel in general or specific?'

    "In specific." Lilian says. There's very little hesitation to her answer. "Life is cruel because everyone wants to live, but very few think to live 'a way'. The arrogance that lets men believe that their own little evils will be for everyone's good eventually is that chain that binds us all to our mutual Hell."

    'No kinder a world then ours, then.'

    Strangely complicated, Lilian says, quietly, "It'd be kinder to you, at least. For however much longer it lasts."

    'It's all that matters.'

    Vertin's smile gives Lilian chills. That alone prevents her from fully submersing herself in the warm bath of friendly voices surrounding her.

    'The St. Pavlov Foundation is home to many arcanists. More than the Manus Vindictae, or anywhere else, for that matter.'

    "Funny that we get to that topic now." says Lilian. She signs, then drains the last of her glass, and finally takes a break before more. "I've always wanted to discuss it with you, but it seems we never got the chance at the Foundation."
Lilian Rook     But the rest of what she has to say is interrupted by the jarring intrusion of crude violence; still weighing her points after Vertin finishes, Lilian hasn't even said a word when the Timekeeper goes toppling out of her chair. Her reaction is, first, incredulity; she looks around expecting abrupt and severe punishment for the intrusion. When she sees that no one at the table even seems to heed the distinction between debate and corrective force, however, a conflicted look comes over her face, and she turns back to Vertin instead.

    Offering her hand as Vertin pulls herself back up again, Lilian leans close enough to not be casually overheard, but not so close that she has to whisper, and allows herself a moment of strained, genuine concern. "Vertin. Please. I'm on your side here, but now isn't the time." She glances aside, but ploddingly finishes what she means to say first, unmasking a significant fraction of her worry in the process. "Can't you see that I'm reading the room? I know we're here against our will, but what's the use in pissing them off like this?" She gives her a moment of lingering, pleading eye contact. "You're never this difficult when the Foundation pushes you around. What's going on?"

    Breaking from the private discussion before it goes on long enough to seem like more than scolding, Lilian weaponizes her disapproving frown as far as she dares.

    'A word of advice, Miss Vertin. Lose those pitiable sympathies to your former leash-holders quickly, or else you may find your loyalty questioned more often than your health can take.'

    "I can't imagine Tamamo will feel very much at ease if she arrives to find Vertin beaten black and blue, Mister Forget Me Not. Regardless of your bad blood with the Foundation, Vertin has been unfailingly helpful to the both of us; I'd kindly suggest adopting an alternative means of making your point for now." It isn't lost on Lilian that she, also, is playing games with Forget Me Not's eagerness to make her comfortable, but it only seems fair. "I did give my word that I'd take care of her. As a matter of hospitality, I'd appreciate it if I weren't pushed very hard to keep it."

    'What else could such magnificent beasts be but perfect ideals straight from the Archive of Imagery?'

    The keyword has Lilian's rapt fascination within moments. There are a thousand and one Elites who've worn far worse attitudes than Lyra's, so her snickering is no object whatsoever. "Depths of Myth? Beg pardon, but this is my first time hearing the term. Do you mean to tell me that this world, too, still retains an Otherside? Nobody's said a word about it if so." she says, or perhaps gushes. "Oh I adore that sort of magic. You're all so liberal with it too! It's been ages since I last had the pleasure."

    'Every arcanist worth noticing is a descendent of somewhere.'

    Taira's linguistic swap puts Lilian on high alert, but after a little while of listening, her alarm at the unfamiliar dialect dies down by several notches. She has ample time to stop and parse something if she needs to, and the benefits of having a wife, coworker, and two friends, who are all from different regions, helps her more than she had expected. It makes her feel the urgent need to demonstrate that she's keeping up, once she has her grip again, and so she kills two birds with one stone by switching to Japanese-- albeit obviously more modern-- when replying to Taira.

    "Is that so? I've always been fascinated by our own family history, but the records are spottier than I'd like; it's all been a mess ever since that disgrace relocated everything to England." Lilian sighs. "It'll likely end up falling to me to restore all of them, before long. I was always the one with the most interest in our origins; I've always admired our ancestors, both as Knights of the Ring of Solstice and as diviners and healers in the House of Connacht."
Lilian Rook     More than just trying to flex her pedigree to fit in, Lilian's tone turns leakily enthusiastic when she says "It's a custom of the old country to invite in the spirits of honoured ancestors on certain days of the calendar, but I've always had the keenest 'sight' when it comes to the dead. It was actually the spirit of my great ancesotr Aoibheil who encourged me to renew the family tradition of knighthood. I inherited the sword with her blessing."

    'And why should we take a human name at all? When the Storm comes, this bar will no longer be owned by anyone known as 'Lawrence Cavendish'.'

    It's too easy to extend a little further. To bare a little more, and to want to be known just a bit more clearly. The need is so strong, and the possibility is so tantalizingly real, that a drunk, frazzled, clingy, love-bombed Lilian can even say "If you put it that way, then I can't help but understand. It may still be a 'human' name, but 'Lilian' means a lot to me. I wouldn't put up with--" Guiltily, she gives Forget Me Not a look of conflicted sympathy. "--that, from anyone."

    'I would like it to become... somewhat more subdued, but isolating from humanity will require capital.'

    The keyword paints itself in bright red in Lilian's mind. The task that she's set herself to-- ingratiating herself with Manus Vindictae-- unfolds so naturally that she doesn't even think twice. "I've never been all that passionate about finance, but I keep up my proverbial chores precisely for occasions like this." she says, a little excited. "Not to mention my research is unbelievably expensive."

    'Oh, you're really nice...? I don't know. I'm not sure about that kind of thing. Are you...?'

    Though she wouldn't normally agree, Lilian blushs easily at the compliment. "A-ah? I'm just showing an interest, though. Shouldn't that much be common?" she says, falling into nervously fiddling with her hair. "You just have the look about you of someone who's always pondering something interesting, so it's hard to resist my curiosity." She tilts her head, waiting for the end of the question, and then frowns sidelong in Vertin's direction.

    'Pardon me, but you're not an Awakened, are you?'

    "Oh. I . . . beg your pardon?" Lilian says, not really sure if her assumption was an insulting one. Nobody seems offended, and she can't imagine Hypothetik getting angry at her, so she carries on before long. "Vertin has the sharpest arcane senses I've ever seen. I'd bet the list of what she can't see is shorter." she says, still committed to upselling Vertin where she can. It's the classic way of old money to get a friend in good graces, but it's the way she knows.

    'Oh, yes, yes! Lady Arcana's fondness for music is something, but I've just always had the belief that transformation is best embodied in the *visual*!'

    The way Lilian smiles, one would assume she'd forgotten all about Donner Pass; and would likely be right. "I couldn't agree more! Though, I am biased; I've certain difficulties with listening to music, but I've always felt at home with pen and paper; the challenge of a superficially 'static' medium is part of the whole-- Ah, I doubt what's in my sketchbook would be all that impressive to you, though."

    'But I must ask; why shy away from the beauty that overflowed from within you?'

    'Transitory' makes Lilian's fine hairs stand on end, but she shrugs off the moment of electric anxiety before it causes her to stall. "Should I say . . . because I think that I'm not yet skilled enough to do it justice? It's a shame to say, but at the rate I was going, it would inarguably have been the end of me; and I have far too much to see and far too many things to finish to be satisfied with putting my brush down just yet." she says, after having refreshed her drink.
Lilian Rook     "But I can sincerely say that it's never left my thoughts; the urge to return to it one day is just impossible to ignore. And since it's known among the wise that one of the great pleasures of travel is its compatibility with spiritual experimentation, it's my hope that some inspiration or perspective, or perhaps enough experience and broadened horizons, might be the key to finally bringing it to life."

    'Somehow, I still find myself underestimating you.'

    Emboldened by what she receives as praise, Lilian effusively continues, "I've actually found a very good lead! Someone like me, who figured out the right technique to-- 'become' without being 'consumed'? But you know, all great artists steal~"

    'More accurately, they wanted me to not research it at all.'
    'I've always been aware that the Foundation had secrets it would like to keep from me. I have memories of my mother as well, but the Foundation insists that no such person exists'

    Like this, free to be ecstatic on Vertin's behalf; to be indignant and protective and sisterly and encouraging all at once, without the detritus of career and organization in the way, Lilian reflects Vertin's excitement back twice as bright, groans and sighs where Vertin won't, and glows with breathless speculation where Vertin won't put it to words. Even the way she holds her hand feels as though she's trying to feel it in her pulse; to know what Vertin doesn't always say, and to bring it out through herself as a conduit, so that it can be aired and admired.

    "It's always the ones who get the most well-behaved children who take them so wildly for granted! Those people are unbelievable! Your level-headedness is far, far more than they deserved, Vertin; if those cynical fucks wouldn't even pretend that they wanted your gratitude then they hardly deserve to shed any tears about whatever you choose from now on! Why don't we make that our first order of business? What better time?"

    ''Suitcase'? That battered old thing?'

    Lilian joins in the expectant staring at Forget Me Not, then flashes a warmly grateful smile at him when he surrenders it.

    'Yes. It opens into another world.'

    "It's beautiful." Tipsy Lilian blurts it out. "It actually makes me so jealous sometimes, hah. Having something so special that you can show off so easily; a power that makes everyone happy . . ."

    'This branch... it should have come from one of your rowan trees, correct? Rowans are symbols of protection and vitality, stubbornly staying alive in any number of environments.'

    Why is it that, of all things, that finally dampens her mood? It's perfectly pleasant conversation. Vertin is respecting the idea of socializing on Manus Vindictae's terms by saying it. It's relevant to Lilian's own culture, and shockingly sensitive of it, whilst meaning nothing but to extend a prosocial olive branch to Druvis. Yet the only thing she cares to say on the subject is "There's a two-hundred year rowan tree on the family property, even." in oddly neutral agreement.

    'As long as a fragment of life remains, the future can someday be filled with it.'
    'Isn't this branch still alive, Miss Druvis? You've used arcanum to keep it at the moment when it was burned.'

    Lilian tries to disguise it as a sigh, but the air is nevertheless driven out of her by a short, sharp blow to the chest, imagined so vividly that it may as well be real.
Lilian Rook     No matter how much she would like to Pander to Druvis' beautifully dignified scars, just like Forget Me Not, this subject, finally, is too personal for her to stay fully out of. She looks at Druvis in such a strangely pained way; like pity without its inherent condescension; sympathy without a sense of doing any better herself, mixed with a queasy kind of silent, hopeful urging that's almost impossible to place.

    The sentiment, whatever it is, is too strong to be ignored; and yet too heavy to be spoken out loud so easily. The only readable in the unbearably complicated look that Lilian gives her, if only for a second, is that somehow nothing Druvis could say in return would shock her.

    'And yours? Is the sword part of your arcane skill, or, your wand?'

    Except that, it seems. Forget Me Not has front row seats to the galling obvious that Lilian must have never been asked. She blinks, then smiles weakly, then looks down, fingers her pendant in thought, then smiles a little more strongly.

    "Traditionally, the women of my family are druids, and the men are diviners and alchemists. My mother and father taught me very little of either, so it'd shame me to compare those efforts to the esteemed company present." Lilian says, in an odd, roundabout way. "The sword is something of an abandoned tradition, but it called to me all the same. I doubt I'd ever choose anything else in another thirty lifetimes."

    She hesitates, but glamering Night Mist in the first place was only to free up her hands during her desperate bid at escape. It'd feel wrong not to take the offer to reveal it, and so she does, smoky black ink spilling from the flourish of her shoulder and arm, and laid flat across the table as it dissipates, dishes moved far aside. Without the taint of panic, Lilian runs her fingers across the mirror-black flat as if she were stroking the fur of an old family cat. "Marfóir sa Cheo Oíche. She's my connection to the founding hero of our line. Sixteen point four nine pounds, treated magnetite-- 'cold iron'-- to the core, older than the crusades, bane of spirits and monsters; Night Mist hasn't left my side since I was six years old. The special way you mean 'wand', I think, might be just right."

    Different from her enthusiasm for the new faces and names that surround her, Lilian's smile takes on a kind of fondness reserved for just one thing. The way she speaks of it is undeniably tender, in the way of describing an old flame. "People don't often see much use in the sword. We live in a world where things are solved by your funds and connections, not your conviction and strength of arm. But I love her, you know? Even if no one remembers Cú Chulainn or Scáthach, the 'incantations' I cast with her can force the world to make sense." Then, her tone veers weary.

    "Night Mist forces 'my arcane skill' to make sense. Practising arcane swordsmanship is a way to beautify it; to give it order and structure and meaning." Lilian's hand ceases moving across the blade. With a note of strange resignation, she returns it smoothly to the gilded black scabbard at her waist, and droops her arm across it, though her right hand never travels far from Vertin's. "I admit, I'm a envious of your bond with the forest. You and Vertin and the others all have an 'arcane skill' that shows the world how much you love something in it. Lady Arcana might be the only person alive who could sincerely call mine 'beautiful'."
Lilian Rook     A little shiver passes over Lilian, cold and electric. "No. It might be that Manus Vindictae is the only place on Earth where it belongs." She'd be acting cryptic on purpose, if she weren't muttering the words to herself like a lunatic. "The woman who is loved by the Storm, and the woman who is just like the Storm herself; it's only natural that she would adore both." The dark downturn in her bleeding sincerity only makes her grip to Vertin tighter.

    'How late of me, to find now a taste for people walking them.'

    "There's no such thing as late anymore." Lilian says. "We've all the time in the world now, don't we?"

                ----------

    'You know we're all Manus now too, right? We're brothers in arms! Mr. Me-Not'll have our backs! A promise is a promise, and he's always been a real upright sorta fellow when it comes to payouts. Ain't that right, boss?'

    There isn't adrenaline left in Lilian's body for this, but from deep, dark wells that are older than her name, there is more than enough delirium to spare.

    The blanking of her face is animalian. Her shifting gaze filters out the irrelevant details of human individuality and traces only along the lines of power between sides; the flow of where it is pulled and given, and where the tectonic motions of approval go with it. Her footing steadies itself to throw a fist on reflex, but it adjusts itself in synaesthetic accordance with the shrinking of 'sacred ground' beneath her.

    Arcana was right. The way Lilian watches this total stranger is far uglier than the learned contempt, painted on a canvas of unlearned inferiority, that Schneider described as the way of Manus Vindictae. She watches him for openings like someone would watch a snarling dog without a leash.

    'Look, maybe the broad can't pay, but we're an understanding bunch. I'm sure we can find some other-- hrkk--!'

    And she doesn't look the slightest bit shocked either. Lilian knew what this would be about from the moment it began. She doesn't need magic to read his mind; the slavering jaws named 'mankind' are too familiar a shade of fear, and too well-worn a hatred. Hoping that Druvis' favour with Forget Me Not is enough to sway Manus Vindictae to choose her over them, if only for being in the Walden, Lilian spits "Is this a joke? How does a walking ghost with mere hours to live come to expect that I'll pay him with my body? I certainly don't recall losing to you. In fact--"

    In the instant before Forget Me Not shuts it down, something about the standoff reaches a critical mass for Lilian. Stranded and left to fend for herself, surrounded by strangers who are all either complicit in an execution or who had cheered it on like animals, recently pushed to her emotional limits only to be torn away from the comedown and forced to justify her own rights in the eyes of those she just had let her guard down for, the combination of nerves, anger, shame, isolation, and betrayal, reaches a point of perfect equilibrium and catalyzes the already crushing withdrawal from a high that she has only just experienced for the first time in her life, and the boiling hot reaction drives every other thought from her mind.

    All of a sudden, it's just like the last twelve years had never even happened. The way that Forget Me Not spoke of 'Holly', freshly in mind, burns in agonizing present tense. The Walden never existed, because she never left Nova Heliosanctus. Vertin was never there, because Hafren and Eleanor are suddenly girls she's never met. The dining floor feels cramped and hot, and the doors are locked for all the wrong reasons. Stripped down to the bone from sheer mental fatigue, with nothing left of 'Chevalier Lilian Rook' to cling to, what flares up within her to fill the void is like a detonation, and it consumes all the air she had left.
Lilian Rook     "--I don't recall giving you permission to breathe."

    'Now, what would you make of this foul reprobate, who still believes himself appointed by the old world?'

    That it was Forget Me Not who paralyzed the man sinks in just as little as that it was Druvis who summoned the raven. The outcome feels like such a natural extension of her utterly ballistic fury that that she doesn't think about it at all. What matters is that someone dragged her back to that time and place and demanded that she prove it again. What matters is that Manus Vindictae knows and they want to see blood. The only thing in the world that means anything is the hilt in her hand the demented intuition that if she doesn't kill this demon again then everything will have meant nothing at all.

    "The only thing you can make out of an Extra is an example." says Lilian

    'They pick at the weak and see if the group allows it.'

    Druvis' disdain is so uncontroversial that Lilian doesn't even think. She says "It's in their nature. They're like flies. All they do is breed and putrefy everything that they touch so they can wallow in the slurry and force you to suck it down or starve." instead. The words come naturally; fast and hot and drippingly acerbic. Saying them feels like throwing up. "You can't let them be, or else even the people who should be your peers get so used to the taste of rot and vomit that they learn to act like them as well."

    It gets nothing out of her system at all. The watching eyes may as well be a ring around her. The man doubled over on the floor is a spectacle, and it's either him or it's her and Lilian has made this choice already in so many ways that it isn't even a choice at all. When she leaves Vertin's side to close the distance, the performance becomes 'for Vertin' as well; because Vertin is inside the circle, and her place isn't in question by default.

    "The world is ending outside because they don't even try control their suicidal greed. I'm stuck in here worried sick about Tamamo because their first instinct is to swarm like locusts when they catch wind of a consequence, and Vertin is here because they  offered her up to the slaughter. Druvis is here because they burnt down her life and then blamed her for it, and everything is fucked because they forced her to do her job! Now people I care about could fucking die because these vermin are giddily stuffing themselves with the gold bricks that they stole, and the only other group with any shelter from the Storm is run by these fucking viruses, so they won't do fuck all either! And why?! Because we tried to save them?!"

    If it weren't for the familiar rasp, Lilian wouldn't have known she drew Night Mist at all. Every other sound is a blur to her. Voices are drowned out completely by the thunder of her heartbeat in her head. "All Tamamo ever wanted was to know you people better, and you repaid her by hunting her like an animal! All I ever wanted was for you to let me live my life, and from the moment you wormed your way into my gutless father's hindbrain you've never missed the slightest chance to make every moment of it a living hell!"
Lilian Rook     She lifts a man she doesn't know off the floor without thinking, dangling him by the collar of his suit. Lilian shakes him just to get him to resist. The point when she began speaking to him instead of about him is lost on her. "Why are you even here?! Can't you see that everything is your fucking fault?! After everything I've done for you people, without a thought for what you put me through, why don't I deserve to just sit down and talk to someone?! Why am I always, always, no matter what I do, somehow fucking asking for it?!"

    There's an instant-- just one-- where she hesitates. The alarm bells that warn her that she is about to cross a line are too basal to her psyche to be drowned out even by the blinding haze of the moment. The failsafe, faint as it is, works for long enough for Lilian to conceive without words 'What would Vertin think of me if I did this?', and in that solitary second, Lilian looks back for all the world like she would rather scream 'I don't want to do this.'

    But Vertin has already killed for Manus Vindictae. She's killed Schneider for it. Willingly or not, that trigger pull is forever a part of Vertin's life now, and her safety at the table is paid for in that blood. That incontrovertible fact is what snuffs Lilian's hesitation in the same breath in which it was born. The thought that she could throw Vertin under the bus as the worse person between them, after all this, sparks a moment of overwhelming guilt out of nowhere; guilt which makes her feel ashamed, which makes her furious all over again, which lets her take comfort in the simple fact that Manus Vindictae wants blood.

    "Don't bother being reborn the new era." says Lilian. She releases the stranger's suit, takes a deep, sharp breath, and before his shoes hit the floor, she splatters the Walden floor all the way to the far wall with as much blood as anyone could possibly hope to see. She flicks the remainder from her blade as if shaking her hand in disgust.

    Lilian returns to the table shaking. She doesn't look up from her glass anymore. She only says "My apologies for that display."
Timekeeper "You're never this difficult when the Foundation pushes you around. What's going on?"

    Shoved to the floor, with her hat knocked off her head, there's a certain rawness to Vertin's emotions that's typically tamped down. As composed as she might seem, her little flare-ups of antagonism are genuinely uncontrolled vents of agitation, visible too in the small resentful scowl on her face as she takes Lilian's help standing up. Aching and stressed, the brief comfort of Lilian's support opens the window for Vertin to snap bitterly back, voice hushed.

    "The Foundation hardly ever forces me to kill my friends." Then she freezes, eyes sliding to the side off of Lilian's in the silence. She squeezes Lilian's hand, then lets go, and the hat finds its place on her head once again. "No, you're right. Thank you."

    Back in her seat, Vertin's expression is completely unreadable, and even Forget Me Not is taken by surprise when she neutrally intones back at him. "It was just a momentary mistake. It won't happen again."

"But whether or not it is indulged in is the choice."

    "Yes. But people, not only humans, use the tools they are given." Vertin sighs, looking balefully with one eye at the gold steak in the center of the table.

    "Perhaps they play the stock market because the hope of sudden wealth is easier to tolerate than the thought of endless poverty. They hoard gold because they are taught that it is equivalent to safety. Those choices were made for them long before they could even choose." That echo of Lilian's earlier statement comes out of Vertin's mouth somehow sympathetic rather than condemning.

    "And now they try to find some way to eat it. Because they are starving, and a starving person wants nothing more than to be fed. Every era, in all different ways, people are desperate, but only ever for the same thing."

"How late of me, to find now a taste for people walking them."

    "It's never too late." Vertin finally takes her hand away from the branch, and only risks one more sentiment under Forget Me Not's glare. "Every tree lives for tomorrow, Miss Druvis."

"Do you mean to tell me that this world, too, still retains an Otherside? Nobody's said a word about it if so."

    Lyra's coy smirk touches just below the edge of 'mean-spirited', partially hidden behind her hand on her cheek. There's the distinct sense that she wants to toy with Lilian, as the overeager junior whose enthusiasm is endearing, but undignified. Only hours past the threshold of the door, and she wants to know every secret already?

    "'Otherside'?~ I suppose I can't be sure of the comparison, being unfamiliar with the term. You'll have to tell me all about it later."

"I was always the one with the most interest in our origins; I've always admired our ancestors, both as Knights of the Ring of Solstice and as diviners and healers in the House of Connacht."

    To Taira, it seems like his swap to Japanese was a form of vibe checking for Lilian. The mythological fox spirit whom he's never met-- likely not the one of this world either-- is a sort of family to him by default, and Lilian's marriage into the clan is something she'll have to continually answer for until he's satisfied. This first test, at least, seems to have been passed, but it's Forget Me Not that leaps on the topic of ancestry.

    "One's lineage is their dignity, don't you agree? I would be *fascinated* to know what help our mediums and psychometrists might be able to provide you on uncovering it." Then on Aoibheil, Forget Me Not looks to Druvis with a little perverted smile. "Magic has a way of knowing who its inheritors are."
Timekeeper "I've never been all that passionate about finance, but I keep up my proverbial chores precisely for occasions like this."

    Forget Me Not laughs a bit, taking a drink and waving for one of the servants to add a couple more steak medallions to Lilian's plate. "My lady, we haven't even had a chance to treat you yet! Until the rain subsides, let us forget this talk of financials and petty realities, and just enjoy each other's company. The Storm's blessing is that we can put aside the woes of civilization for a time."

    The grim reality that Lilian is clearly settling in for a long relationship with the Manus Vindictae makes Vertin stiffen up, but there still hasn't been an opportunity to get a word aside. "You said the humans are out in the forest? Why?"

    Forget Me Not sighs. Vertin's interrogation denies the magic circle of hedonistic safety he would like to have around Lilian, but as the messenger of Arcana's wishes, he does have an obligation to relay the Manus's next steps.

    "As their world ends, they grovel to those they despised only a day before to save them from their retribution. Unable to understand why they have become ill, they come to my Walden to beg for a remedy. Isn't it ridiculous, that they drive themselves to such insane lengths as to chew and swallow their gold and jewelry, and then still expect to be pampered?"

"Then how are we to 'attend to them'?"

    "We will meet them where they are in the woods, with all their desperate politicians, socialites, and journalists, and they will have their remedy." It couldn't be easier to tell exactly how Forget Me Not feels when he finishes, "And then they will pay for it."

"Someone like me, who figured out the right technique to-- 'become' without being 'consumed'?"

    It's still Lilian that Vertin has her eyes on, among the roiling festival of afflatus being expressed by all the apostles of the Manus Vindictae. There's no doubt that she's been listening to everything, forming conclusions behind those eyes of hers in her uncannily insightful way, but she's nothing but gentle to Lilian while she enthuses so freely.

    "Is that so? I'm glad, then. You seem to have gotten quite far with the help of the people around you. What do you expect to find on the other side?"

". . . if those cynical fucks wouldn't even pretend that they wanted your gratitude then they hardly deserve to shed any tears about whatever you choose from now on!"

    "No," Vertin agrees, slowly trodding through the words as if it's her first time saying them. "They don't."

    "Deserving isn't all that factors into tears, however, so they'll cry regardless." After that circuitous statement, Lilian can feel in the contact of their hands the way that Vertin's pulse slowly climbs, like a small tremor of excitement. "Do you think it's important? I was never quite certain."

"We live in a world where things are solved by your funds and connections, not your conviction and strength of arm. But I love her, you know?"

    Forget Me Not drinks in the sword as it's laid out for observation, and the other apostles at the table lean over to admire it too-- besides Hypothetik, who just tries to awkwardly peek at what everyone else is so engrossed by. Somewhat troubled by his inability to read the inscription on the blade, but more than made up for by Lilian's enthusiasm for it, Forget Me Not's attention to her is ravenous.

    "Only for now. Only 'now' is the time where strength and conviction mean nothing to the world. Before, when the world was whole, your sword spoke to an undeniable truth."
Timekeeper "The woman who is loved by the Storm, and the woman who is just like the Storm herself; it's only natural that she would adore both."

    "No." Vertin murmurs quietly, not speaking to anyone but Lilian. The resigned certainty in her voice, and the lingering tightening of her hand around Lilian's, removes any doubt that she might not know what she's talking about. "The Storm is indiscriminate."

"The only thing you can make out of an Extra is an example."

    The word, equally unknown to both Forget Me Not and Vertin, still comes across with its full intended payload, identically to both but with opposite reception. Forget Me Not's giddy bloodthirst shines through shamelessly, and Vertin's stomach drops like a rock. Lilian's hand slipped away the moment she stood up; Vertin gets to her feet and tries to take it again, but the way her fist curls makes it impossible.

    "Lilian...? He can't hurt you. It's already over. You're safe."

"I'm stuck in here worried sick about Tamamo because their first instinct is to swarm like locusts when they catch wind of a consequence, and Vertin is here because they offered her up to the slaughter."

    There's no stopping her now, but that doesn't mean Vertin won't try. She's helpless to do anything about the crowd besides a short, almost-pleading glare shot around the room, but she murmurs to Lilian in the vain hope that she can reach through the peaking fury on her own.

    "We can just step away. Can't you see that the Manus could have sent the humans away at any time? This is what they were waiting for. Lilian, please."

"Why am I always, always, no matter what I do, somehow fucking asking for it?!"

    Forget Me Not bows his head and steps away from the paralyzed human, who can't make any noise besides frantic grunts of discomfort. "Then give him your answer, Lady Rook."

    Left behind at the table when Lilian took her place at the execution block, Vertin is briefly left adrift in a sickening haze. Schneider, of course, is alive. If she said so now, it would only confuse Lilian, and anger the rest. The wall between them, the things that should have been said but never were, fills the space between the two of them and readies to inexorably claim another victim.

    Wordlessly, Vertin steps up behind Lilian just as she raises her blade. They softly lay a hand on her elbow, before, and unflinchingly after, guiding her back to her seat as the body crumples behind them. Neither of them would look at the other to see what their faces look like in the moment.

    There's an upswelling of either praise or ambivalence in response. Applauding the surety of her paint stroke and how cleanly it embodies her pain, sneering at the fate of the man, welcoming her again, as if it was in question, to the Manus Vindictae. Forget Me Not does command all the masked remainders to leave, eminently satisfied with the outcome, and the rest of the dinner can proceed in peace.