Palais de Justice, Quartier Publique, Port-a-Lucine; Night of March 24th, 770
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Tomas wrote:"Lia, he knows." Tomas puts a gentle hand on her shoulder. "Let the man do his job, ja? Besides..."
'The restoration is not what it seems.'
"Cerise." Tomas says with a haunted look in his eye, as though he had just solved for "x" on a polynomial of the damned. "Could you tell me that story about the burnt wing of the asylum again, please? In detail?"
Lia might well have saved her breath. M. Gauvain did not respond. Perhaps he, like Darius, felt anything more he had to say would be obvious. Either way, he was gone. The guard at the door escorted you out a few minutes later, once she was content that you didn't have any priceless artifacts hidden in your shoes. The snow was falling gently from a dark grey sky, but off in the distance, near the University, you could see black storm clouds roiling.
"Umm, I'm not sure what else there is to say," Cerise admitted, with a shrug. "The records are
really bad... half the time we're lucky if there's even a patient name on them, some of them were people they picked up off the streets, or 'family embarrassments' that got stuffed there to be forgotten. They only knew about the patient's fear of reflections and the metal serving tray from what they pieced together after the fact. Most of it was talking about what happened to the patients trapped in that wing when it went bad."
"I'll go back and look through the records again when I have a spare moment," she volunteered.
Kerrian wrote:"I'm wondering..why does this mystery woman have lesions, and cover her hands? Something she works with, some disease..or weird mirror worlds doing awful things to you?"
"It could be," Cerise said. "I mean, if you're lucky that mirror stuff just goes away, but sometimes? It gets into things. And once it's there, it
spreads. Lesions sounds a little too, um, normal, though."
Richard, on the other hand, seemed interested in a different part of Kerrian's theory. "Something she, she works with?"
"There, there's an old story I was told by one of the Anchorites in, in Grimshaw," he told Kerrian. "About a, a brother and, and sister who visited the Icon of Ezra. The sister was, was lame, her legs withered, and, and prayed with all her heart to be healed, so that she, she wouldn't be a burden on her brother any longer. The, the brother also prayed, because he was sick of taking care of her, and wanted to, to be free to do whatever he wanted. The next day, the sister's legs were, were healed, but her brother's legs withered away, leaving him at the mercy of his sibling."
"I'd, I'd heard rumors the icon had, had been more active, of late," he finished, his grey eyes unreadable.
47 Rue Foyle, Quartier Savant, Port-a-Lucine; Late Night of March 24th, 770
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"That was really disappointing!" Cerise pouted as you walked along the snow-crusted street, her red boots kicking up tuffs of white powder.
"It, it was? I was, was surprised he took Captain Cedolin in with so, so little persuasion," Richard replied, raising his eyebrows slightly. "And, and he is putting a great deal of trust in, in us. I, I imagine if he had any help to, to spare he wouldn't be letting us continue with this investigation." There was, perhaps, a slight frown on Richard's mouth, that said he had a few other theories why M. Gauvain might be sending you to investigate rather than the gendarme, but he didn't say any of them aloud.
"Yes, but he was eating!" Cerise protested. "Vampires don't eat! This ruins everything!" She paused for a moment, thinking, before suddenly brightening back up again. "Unleeeeeess he's a vegetarian vampire? I once read this one thing about this mysterious rabbit-"
The tension of the events before proved too much. Richard burst out laughing.
Rue Foyle was in the Quartier Savant, near the very southern wall of Port-a-Lucine. People sometimes forgot that Port-a-Lucine was a walled city, but it was. The walls were short and old, and in many cases people had built right up to the edge, and spread out around the gates. They'd have held for a few hours at most against the tools of modern siege-craft, against cannons and mortars, but they were still around.
Rue Foyle itself was a street of tall, expensive-looking townhouses, that opened right up into one of Port-a-Lucine's public parks. It was one of the nicest neighborhoods in the city, with snow-bound trees and mossy hills covered in frost, and nearby a great greenhouse, panels of glass covered in crystals of ice.
Number 47 was just a little inside, a stately townhouse four stories tall, nestled next to others. It was a residence, same as nearly every place on the street, with the exception of the post office across the street and a merchant's office on the corner. It looked genteel, fashionable, and
expensive.
It was also locked. Of course, you had a warrant, but even then this might have proved a problem had you not noticed that someone had left one of the windows un-latched.
"I, I guess I meant to ask this earlier, but there just, it didn't seem to be a good time," Richard mentioned, rubbing his beard awkwardly. "But are, are we alright for this?" There were more specific concerns hidden in the question, but he didn't seem to want to mention one of you being a single breath away from death, or another becoming suddenly electrified after being hit with a blast that should have killed a normal man. "What happened before on the, the Archeron was, was, a close thing."
