Evening Tea [M4.4]

They closed the doors and windows that evening at Wicklow Teas and Confections to keep out the cold. The main chef made an opportunity of the temperature change to present some rare menu items, savory, warm, and comforting; food normally one wouldn’t crave given Amat Nina’s traditional mild and humid weather.

"You seem different."

Giovele holds a cup of warmed caramel-chocolate milk. Her frank assessment seems to demand an answer. Her detail-oriented gaze compliments the demand, as she focuses on Mica across the table. "Are you still even interested in looking at the artifacts?"

Her feet slide on the tile below the table ever so slightly. Her shoulders curl in as though trying to grab the warmth from her drink, but she doesn’t drop eye contact.

What does Mica do?

"Different?" Mica frowns, puzzled. He has been feeling a bit out of sorts, he supposes. Too warm, despite the unusually cool weather, and slightly… nauseous maybe? Not quite, but there’s a peculiar, fluttery sensation in his stomach that he can’t quite place. Perhaps he’s coming down with a fever or something.

Other than that, he had thought the evening was going well. The tea was excellent, as always, and the food was pretty good too. He’d tried to steer Giovele away from the rarer, more expensive items on the menu by enthusiastically recommending the (more reasonably priced) pastries and confectionaries that the shop normally sold, conscious that if he spent more than 2 gazetta on this ruse, he would be losing money rather than making it. They’d shared a selection of crumbly flat cakes dusted with powdered sugar and thick slices of spiced bread baked full of dried fruit and nuts.

"Of course!" he hastily reassures her when she brings up the artifacts. "I’ve been looking forward to this all afternoon."

Giovele breaks eye contact and tips her head slightly down, an embarrassed smile grows on her face.
"It has been quite a day." Mica can see a few fresh papercuts on her fingers."I just thought for a moment…"

She doesn’t finish the thought.

"It is of no matter. This was delicious. Thank you." She clicks over to a more business-like tone. "So, which did you prefer, the crumble cakes or spice bread?"

She looks at her watch and pushes back in the chair just a bit, she is ready to head back to the office. "When we go in, I’ll let the others know you are invited as a consultant, to look over the E5-200 designates, but really you can peruse them all, they are in the same holding station."

What does Mica do?

"The company," Mica quips in response to Giovele’s question. "But the cakes were a close second."

He leaves a small stack of coins on the table to pay for the food and follows Giovele out of the tea shop and into the orange-tinged twilight.

"So is this the sort of lie where everyone knows it’s a lie and we’re all just playing along so no one gets in trouble or are we actually trying to convince your coworkers that I’m a real consultant?"

Giovele tilts her head just slightly, but her stance remains formal and business-like. "No, not even a lie." She steps outside and moves toward the offices. The crisp air hangs dense tonight. The various plants that line the street droop with condensation. A thin stream of mist leisurely billows from the bay and up toward the aberration. The gaslamps are alight, casting reflections off the damp cobblestones like ripples of a pond. Down the street, a despondent busker squeezes out a slow, quiet melancholy tune from his accordion-- he hums along, as though he’s forgotten the lyrics, but knows the melody.

"I’ve already filled out the E5-200 Designate form. Just, do not go asking for compensation. I left that one as ‘diminimis.’ Which, nobody will believe, as every consultant charges an exorbitant amount."

A loud set of slow footsteps echo from the north.

The seven-foot-man that hunted Biardo plods along Wicklow Street. He has a crumbled rag on his head as if staunching a wound. A hint of steam rises from his scalp into the night air.

Giovele considers the man only briefly.

"Shall we?" She smiles and puts out her arm. Despite her reservations, she still wants Mica to escort her back to the office.

What does Mica do?

Giovele holds tight to Mica’s arm. The tune from the accordion proves infectious, and she begins to hum along. She knows the song and begins to quietly sing. She has a lovely voice.



We have a sun and a cloud
We have time for tomorrow but none for today.
The shrill of the sorrow, the tangle of laughs
Are lost to me,
lost to me,
lost to me.

La la na la na la na

Lost to me
Lost to me
Lost to me

As Mica approaches the glyph above the office door, one of the interwoven fingers gives of a slight glow, almost imperceptible. But Mica catches it.

And then as he crosses the threshold, there is a flicker…

Mica can tell there is a low-level alert registered on the glyph. Probably nothing to cause any reaction by those responsible for the security of the offices, but somewhere, someone was notified and likely consider it a false alarm.

What does Mica do?

As he steps across the threshold and the glyph above the door flickers, Mica is suddenly overcome with the horrible sensation of something crawling up the back of his throat. He coughs reflexively, covering his mouth with his hand and, when the sensation passes and he lowers his hand, his palm is speckled with flecks of void-black ink. He saw the same ink spreading over the pages of the Codex only a couple of hours earlier. He stares at the droplets of ink for a moment, alarmed, and then quickly closes his fist to hide the ink from Giovele.

"Pardon me. Must be all the extra mist in the air," he lies badly, too rattled to be properly convincing. He recalls what Giovele had said to him in the teashop and a very unsettling thought occurs to him. "…Giovele, when you said I seemed ‘different’ earlier, what exactly did you mean by that? Different how?" His tone is serious, with an underlying note of trying-not-to-panic. He had let himself believe that whatever the Codex erased was superficial—some small, unimportant detail probably—but if it had a perceptible impact on his personality, obvious even to someone who has only known him for a few hours, then that was clearly not the case.

Giovele slowly releases Mica’s arm and turns to face him. Her eyes focus on his, she makes note of the welling panic in Mica’s demeanor. Her brows wrinkle as she tries to verbalize her thoughts.

"When we first met, you were…curious, about everything, not just the artifacts. Genuinely curious and kind.."
She’s too modest to bring herself to say, or presume, that Mica was curious about her specifically. But Mica can tell her feelings are, not really hurt, but rather, disappointed. She is basically saying, she doesn't feel genuinely liked by Mica anymore.

"But now, you seem…indifferent, bored, going through the motions."

She reaches out and places a concerned hand on Mica’s shoulder.

"What is going on?"

Serious doubts flicker across her face. She’s starting to question her offer to show Mica the artifacts…not out of self-interest, per se, but for Mica’s sake.

What does Mica do?

Mica’s eyebrows knit together in consternation as he finally grasps what Giovele is getting at. "Well, firstly, I should say I do like you rather a lot, Giovele, and I’m sorry to have made you doubt that," he says, earnestly.

He feels like he owes Giovele some kind of an explanation. If not the whole truth, then at least as much of it as he can give her.

"It’s… complicated," he says, slowly, choosing his words carefully to avoid telling Giovele about the Codex while still being as truthful as possible. "Recently I’ve been experimenting with a new kind of magic that can affect knowledge and memory. I’ve been a bit over-confident, not as cautious as I honestly should have been, and this afternoon, one of my memories got corroded by it. I didn’t know exactly what it did at the time, but now I think it might have obscured my feelings about you. Worse still, I suspect I’m only capable of this level of self-awareness about it thanks to the interference of these glyphs." He waves a hand at the glyph over the door.

As Mica waves a hand at the glyph it occurs to him that the Monksong might also neutralize the power the Codex has over him. Perhaps his memory would also recover for a few hours after the song sends the spirits away.

Giovele leads Mica back into the Office. The lights in the lobby are off, but there is still activity in the back. Four other workers are shuffling papers, stacking artifacts, transcribing logs, and other such activities.

"Well, it seems like your curiosity leads you into trouble quite often." She grabs a pre-filled consultation form, snaps it into a clipboard, and then shoves it into Mica’s hands. "Here’s more trouble for you, you’ll need to fill out that section when you’re done."

She points to the bottom of the page, which reminds Mica of some of the more tedious Atheneaum tests. It actually asks for some detailed insights into the artifacts, mostly focusing on if they could be a danger to Amat Nina, such as: are they leyline resonant, are they safe around quicksilver, etc…Mica catches Giovele finally betray a little smile of relief-- perhaps with a hint of delight, when she thinks Mica is busy with the paperwork.

"As paperwork goes, that one might also destroy your memory."

The hallway to the Signatory office is dark. Mela Vinve’s door is closed.

Giovele is about to take Mica to the other side of the office, where the artifacts are laid out, farther away from Vinve's office.

What does Mica do?

"I’ve got the self-preservation instincts of a moth in a room full of candles," Mica agrees as he follows Giovele into the signatory office. "It’s part of my charm."

He doesn’t spare a glance for Mela Vinve’s office, even as they walk right past the door. He has a plan—well, most of a plan—and it begins with getting into the holding station where the artifacts are kept.

"I can feel my mind turning to mush already," he jokingly laments as he glances over the consultation form Giovele gave him. He raises an eyebrow at the name pencilled in at the top of the sheet. "Tomil Faux?"

What appears to be the entire treasury of Abberant Lord Enlith lays distributed across several tables, tagged, sorted, cataloged. Each item sitting in its wooden tray.

Mistwalkers consider Lord Enlith one of the persistent lords.

Crowns, scepters, book collections, paintings, the diversity and scope of the items are impressive.

"Alright, Tomil, here you go." Giovele announces loud enough for all the other staff to hear. They are so busy only one other person looks up to give Mica the most brief of glances, and then they turn their head down back to the thankless task of making labels, and forms.

Giovele steps back over to her desk, pausing only momentarily to consider the stack of forms that tower in her inbox.

What does Mica do?

Mica walks up and down the rows of tables, holding his clipboard, stopping every now and then to make a show of more closely examining this or that artifact. The artifacts are fascinating, but Mica isn’t too interested in crowns and sceptres as he is busy searching the collection for his favourite kind of aberration artifact — spirit boxes.

As Mica inspects the collection he begins to recall... spirit boxes from the Aberration are extremely rare. Usually, even when found, they were collected from an Amat Nina citizen.

After a third time through, Mica's convinced, no spirit boxes.
One of the helpers stands to gather the paperwork and is shocked not much has been filled out.

What does Mica do?

Mica puts on a thoughtful expression and scribbles down some nonsense on his clipboard so it looks like he’s doing something productive as he frantically tries to come up with a new plan.

He could try to sneak across the office, he supposes, absentmindedly doodling pictures of cats in the margins of the form Giovele gave him, but he’s not exactly inconspicuous and there’s not a lot of places to hide. Besides, if any of the clerks happened to glance over at the holding station while he was busy sneaking around, they would notice he was gone.

The only other idea that occurs to him is, if anything, even stupider. He eyes the orderly rows of artifacts spread out across the tables. Lord Enlith might not have had a spirit box, but he certainly did have a lot of other interesting stuff. There’s a chance, Mica thinks, that one of these artifacts might be useful, or at least might help him cause some kind of a distraction so that he can get into Vinve’s office without anyone noticing. Of course, there’s also a chance that messing around with any of these artifacts might kill him or worse.

He examines the labels on a few of the nearest artifacts— a fur mantle, a painting of a meadow, an ornate sceptre shaped like the head of a swan— to see what kind of information has been gathered about these objects as part of the cataloguing process.