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Timekeeper	The safehouse of the Manus Vindictae holds no pretenses of being a domain for humanity anymore. The electric lights of the Walden were shattered in the fighting for the most part, and now will-o'-the-wisps and candles float in place of bulbs. Chairs were knocked over, glasses dropped off tables, tapestries down down from the walls and trampled by the crowds-- the aesthetics of wealth all remain, and the skeleton of the speakeasy runs through the building, but this would not be a place fit for the civilized humans of Chicago, chaotic as it is.     Alchemical spillage mixes together to sizzle into a faint sickly fog. The stage, and the floor around it, is pockmarked with holes from Sotheby's Stonebelly Buster that yawn open into blue and gold draperies over a dreamlike labyrinth. Only one table on the main floor is unscathed, surrounded by the most ornate chairs available, and covered with candles and alembics and glasses of alcohol.     The blue and black-riddled musicians still play as if nothing at all has happened.     Druvis's cage contains three exhausted songbirds when she returns, half-masked. Neither Vertin or Schneider could put up enough fight to keep themselves from being trapped in Druvis's thorny prison, and Lilian is only gradually coming back to consciousness by the time she's brought back into the Walden. Vertin sits in the bottom of the cage, knees up to her chest, with her arms wrapped around her suitcase. The feeble attempts her arcanum made to break through failed, and eventually petered off into silence. The uneasy, flat set of her expression only breaks from staring intensely off into space to flicker worriedly to one of the other people present: Schneider, Lilian, or even Druvis, whose revealed face is familiar to her, too.     The crowds that flooded the Walden only an hour ago have mostly died down into a steady trickle, some masked, and some still not. The loyalest followers of the Manus Vindictae filter into the labyrinth piece by piece, attending to something or other at their masters' orders, or fetching new masks for the others. The humans still on the fence cluster in pockets of conversation in the corners of the bar, some quiet, others loudly still worked up from the unexpected revelations and fighting just an hour earlier. Bickering and energetic shouts occasionally punch through the pleasant jazz coming from the musicians' alcove, and every once in a while, a fight breaks out that leaves one human beaten or bloody on the carpet.     The central table is worried not at all about the scuffles of their underlings. The crab-faced arcanist drinks beer and scoffs in annoyance, the lady in the painting claps at a particularly vicious display, a human-sized plush elephant averts his eyes, the little vampire girl sits on the back of one of her masked followers and waits, bored. Forget Me Not himself is righting the flower pots that occupied nearly every corner of the speakeasy, plucking flowers that were torn from their soil by the antics of Geed or Baker and Seventh and returning them to their planters. None of them are any worse for wear for the violence, immortally pristine.     He claps delightedly and hurries over when Druvis returns with her prisoners. "Ah! You're back, Lady Druvis. Your success is peerless, as always."     "The traitor and the bureaucrat, and..." Forget Me Not's eyes glitter, pupils slit. He pushes up his glasses with a finger, fangs slipping past his lips in a smile. "How interesting. Now, then."     Despite Vertin's protests, he reaches through the gap in the cage bars to pluck her suitcase out of her grasp, as well as Schneider's guns, not touching Lilian at all. "You humble both myself and your enemies with the glory of your arcanum. Did they trouble you, my lady?"
Schneider Greco	Schneider's guns have already been unloaded; magazines perhaps in Druvis's possession. She is slumped against the bars of a birdcage, stirring only dully as if from a groggy morning. A thin trickle of blood oozes from her hairline. A new wound, or an old one? Hard to keep track.      "Mnnnh..." Her fingertips reach fruitlessly for the cool stability of her guns, when Forget Me Not takes them away. But that, too, she had guessed.      - - - -      "Oh, my-la-dy... che peccata, but what we've done can't be un-done. There's no time. Listen--" she had said.      - - - -      (Clack, clack, clack... drip, drip, drip.)      "Pray tell," says a voice like song and water from behind Forget Me Not, "why have we caged the two of worth? Release them."      That horrid black spike, and the obscene blood-brains-dirt-oil that drips perpetually from it, becomes visible first around Forget Me Not's shoulder as She emerges from the hallway behind.      Her eyes are not for her loyal followers, all around. They are for Vertin and Lilian, with a shameless raptness of attention. Leaning to look at them around Forget Me Not, simple obstacle that he is, she touches a finger to her cheek to accentuate her smile.      A tar-thick droplet rolls down her neck, black as her pupils.      "My deepest apologies to ye," she purrs, with simple sincerity, and then sweeps her hand to the ornate table. "Will you not seat yourselves and sup with me? Nothing would bring me joy the more, than to reunite with my wayward children."
Ein	Openfaced, mask shattered, Druvis' ashen-caked soot 'eyeshadow' runs from the heat under her mask, blotted across bare cheek as she hopes to understand and knows, 'Oh, my-la-dy... che peccata, but what we've done can't be un-done.' -what was burned cannot be unburned. At 'listen', Druvis draws up to approach, seeing Schneider past the shrinking and drying wall of roots between them, and abandons her wand for a moment to reach past barrier and try to find Schneider. Hesitant after that impulse, she shies back and winces and spends almost a second deaf to all but her heart at the overwhelming thought that comes of that, how impossibly dirty and ashen and burn-stung her hand is, and only after can she listen, wildness in eyes distant before returning. 'I've done this?' lingers at the periphery of her visible eyes, with the advance of the Manus up the tunnel what causes her final decision. She has just enough time to listen, at least, and then-- "Don't touch them." Druvis commands the Manus on approach, having gained hold of Schneider's pistols in their brief meeting despite being bested. Incanting while drawing sooty left hand up, fingers risen, to occlude her open right side of face, her right palm commands anew her own wand to ''seize'' the trio of Vertin, Schneider, and the waking Lilian in a caged palanquin of fiber and roots, something that would prevent anything from happening to those within so she could have time to think. It was all-new to be obsessed with the vision that spoke to her, in the cage whose thorns and sharpness were only found on the outside, that no-one else noticed her fortress wrapping. In this way, wrapped in the momentarily renewed garb of her imperiousness with a bulletwound visible on her face, she takes them back out of the labyrinth, trying to find her place in the dream and hang her face in the way she remembered. Listening to everything, all at once, made her quickly wish to be left alone completely, but to walk out into the Storm and be washed away was even less of a choice. 'When the Storm comes and water burns, my-la-dy, if there are diff-erent things to listen-to, will you be a different 'Druvis'? ... I am scared of it, I think,' Schneider had filled her mind with questions, too loud to be ignored. Now, in one hand, she held all the wand she had given up to another completely to be theirs, and in the other her own, crooked in arm to be carried like a procession for a funeral. Whose was she walking to? 'Are you?' If she was to become a different Druvis completely, a different being completely, and be done with this world... why any of this? Why anything? Why did she trudge back and forth between the corpse of her forest and this Walden? Why didn't she lay down and die? 'Are you?' Wasn't she afraid that she'd just have let the arsonist and the Chicago that spawned them get away with it all and succeed in ruining her? 'Are you?' There were different things to listen to now. Why now, when she was like this? Why now, when... There was nothing for it. She was scared. Without being deafened by the open doors of grief, she could only say that she was afraid, and so terror lifted her feet and pressed her forward. --- Druvis enters the Walden's main room, pace steady, canting head towards Forget Me Not, the faint 'really?' painted on her sooted cheek as her visible eye drills him with a ferocious intensity before she remembers that, yes, FMN does mean everything he says, and she relaxes, sighing plainly into her mask. She was much more expressive without a wooden wall occluding all. "Not as peerless as all of them." She dryly observes, though none of the other lords of the Vindictae had risen a finger to act, so she remained without peer by definition. "The new one." She confirms, neutrally, of Lilian.
Ein	"One did. One of the. . ." Druvis' frown pulls lips. "Loud philosophers, and their giant. Your Walden is more root than foundation, now." Druvis exhales, eye glancing away. "I have not called that much power before, for so long. Yet the air is full with it, and I am only as winded from a walk." The Storm continued to fill the air with gnosis, and it was just one more voice that Druvis tried to focus through to keep going. What was she doing? It was-- 'why have we caged the two of worth? Release them.' 'The Two of Worth' isn't a designation Druvis can attain without further clarification. It's not ringingly clear to her, the 'it's not Schneider' face up yet rejected as a false possibility initially, and in a moment of finding the simplest answer compliance, Druvis waves with hand that leads wand and the crescent-bearing staff reflects moonlight inside as the bars grow open and bend apart, not fully disengaging but growing into a looser configuration to decage them all simply. At 'my deepest apologies', Druvis takes a step back while taking cane in both hads again and tilting head to Forget Me Not. ". . . May I have a towel?" She asks, keenly aware of her sooted and worse, borne face.
Lilian Rook	Whatever happened to her wasn't normal. She knew that long before she woke. The instinctive register of her condition; of all the time between then and now in the few ways she could perceive it; still rings with the unfamiliar, disturbing tones of something that should never have happened in the line of duty. Dull embers of consciousness, fanned weakly by silence and stillness, just now starting to glow in the presence of human voices; even those are enough for Lilian to know that something must be profoundly wrong. She had dreamed for a time, after all, and if anything were as it should be, she shouldn't be aware of that fact.     Lilian's eyes flutter closed. Cheek to the flagstones, knees to her chest, the undirected motions of REM give way to roving sweeps of blind intentionality, searching through the blackness behind her eyelids. Her lips move next. The words are murmured too innocently to be lucid. She calls "Ceo Oíche? Cá bhfuil sibh? . . . Ceo Oíche?", and her heartbeat starts to race, then pound, and then the sickening coldness rises into her throat and drives from her in panic, "Ceo Oíche?! An bhfágfá anois?! Ceo Oíche!"     The twitching of her fingers behind her back grows frantic. Within moments, the confusing reluctance of her body turns to thrashing. Then lurching awake all at once, Lilian is deprived of even the dignity of a cold sweat to explain her condition. She starts to rise, blurts out "Suaimhneas Éigeantach--!" and falls again, opening her eyes again on impact with the floor. The first thing she can think to say to anyone at all is "Cailín fíodóir! Vertin! Where is she?! Where is my sword?!"     The rest comes only after, sinking in only once she's seized upon the emptiness of her hands and the absence of four grams of metal around her neck that she feels as keenly as having been stripped bare, and done the first thing she could think of to fix it. Lilian turns her focus inward and runs it through her body, fighting only dry sweat and scraped knees for inventory, then she tries to recall where and how she lost her blouse, and the black stains that she'd discarded it for come luridly to mind.     She recognizes Schneider's presence first after Vertin's, and feels a surge of queasy-expectant calm dampen her panic by half, buouyed by the arcanist's presence; even unarmed, the odds of the three of them working out something together is higher than just two. She recognizes Forget-Me-Not's second, and the feels that relief chased by a hot flush of shame-riddled anger shortly after. Then, Lilian recognizes Arcana, and all the blood in her veins freezes so thoroughly that the bars finally snap into focus.     The idea that she'd been captured briefly strikes her as so ludicrous that Lilian wonders if this is all still part of the same dream; and then but a moment later, it's all that she can think of in her bleary state of pulse-pounding, scatterbrained confusion. In rapid, silently panicked succession, she tries shifting her thigh to feel for her sidearm, then twisting her upper body to listen for her belt mountings against the floor. Unused training, nearly forgotten over many years of irrelevance, reminds her to check herself for symptoms of drugging, test the security of any restraints, assess the area for exits and surveillance devices. What she does instead is suddenly remember that she doesn't remember her identification number at all, and laughs deliriously for all of two syllables.     "Surely you must be joking." Lilian says to Arcana, forbidding her eyes to move away from the tip of the spike through her head for paralyzing fear of seeing anything else. "Am I to be a ritual sacrifice or the like? I couldn't possibly think of a worse idea."
Timekeeper	"One did."     Forget Me Not frowns, genuinely sorrowful at the confirmation, but even more upset by the visible harm the bullets did that only one person could have fired. He steeples his fingers together in front of his chin, eyes towards the labyrinth. "I see. How regretful that they've slipped away from us. Your triumph speaks for itself, then, even in the face of such irritations."     He waves his hand reassuringly, trying to gas her up past the frown without really understanding the cause of it. "It's no matter, my lady. Your touch could never lessen my Walden, only bring us all ever-higher." A little greasily, he rubs his hands together. "Is that *so*? Such is the result of the erosion of the suffocating air of this wretched era! The true face of the world is being laid bare, my lady, and with each passing hour, your place at its pinnacle becomes ever more clear~." "Release them."     Forget Me Not gasps, finger curling in front of his mouth. Not one to disagree with Arcana for even a fraction of a moment, he bows and steps aside when she brushes past him, but his eyes shoot daggers towards Vertin. "Two? My lady...."     Vertin seems even more perturbed than he is. Her brows furrow, a glimmer of anger across her face when Arcana smiles so sincerely at her and Lilian. "I don't accept that apology. Within the cage or not, we're still prisoners here, and I won't be called worthy by you."     There's no reason not to say it before standing up, so she does. Desperate times can call for desperate lies, but being cornered is freeing too. "I won't take my eyes off of you, Schneider."     Even with her being the only one deemed 'unworthy' and left in the cage, trusting in Schneider is her only hope. Her priorities haven't shifted, even while standing up and brushing the dirt and grime off of her suit, from ensuring the survival of all three of them at any cost. More than her vision, Schneider won't leave her mind. ". . . May I have a towel?"     "...! Of course! Forgive me for my negligence." Less distracted by Arcana's appearance now, Forget Me Not hurries over to fetch a bartender's towel from behind the bar. Reaching into his own stash on his person, he uncorks a vial of some healing potion and drips it onto a dampened towel, presenting it to Druvis for her use.     As the vines bend apart, Forget Me Not firmly interjects, agitated enough to speak in an authoritative tone in front of Druvis and Arcana even if it's just to clarify the latter's will. "The traitor stays. The likes of her will never be welcome at our table."
Timekeeper	Vertin grimaces, but Lilian starts to stir as the cage peels open, and they won't just stand here and post pointlessly. She kneels down to give Lilian support to stand up, and is nearly bowled over when she thrashes in a panic. Thrown backwards, gripping Lilian's arm tightly in her first instinct to keep her from accidentally hurting herself, the stream of Irish goes over Vertin's head and leaves her wide eyed in confusion at first.     "Lilian?! Are you alright?!"     She can't know the context behind the sword, but the sheer psychological outcry of Lilian's reaction tells Vertin everything she needs to know. Past Arcana and Forget Me Not, sitting near the head of the long wooden table, Vertin's eyes dart towards the suitcase that holds her only remedy for Lilian's current state. Supporting Lilian at the mouth of the cage, all of her body language is hostile and tense surrounded by the Manus, but Vertin's next words are warily polite.     "I stored Lilian's sword in my suitcase for safekeeping earlier, and as you can see, it's a very dear belonging of hers. If we're to speak over supper, I'd like to retrieve it for her first."     Forget Me Not's wide smile while watching the exchange somehow perfectly straddles the line between 'predatory' and 'moved nearly to tears', focused solely on Lilian. "Na bi buartha. You may; and then, sit, as the Guiding One instructed."     Vertin walks past Forget Me Not with her hat sloped across her eye, followed by the gaze of all the arcanists already sat at the table as she approaches the suitcase. She puts her fingers on the clasps, then takes a deep breath before reciting the incantation that exposes the interior, in a language incomprehensible to everyone present except one.     "Ne iru milde en tiun bonan nokton. Koleregu, koleregu kontra? la estingi?o de la lumo."     From that starry void inside the suitcase, she withdraws Night Mist by its handle, then clumsily turns it around to hand it to Lilian. She's acutely aware of her surroundings, handing off a weapon at a Manus Vindictae enemy's permission to Lilian, in the heart of their base. She won't say thank you, but there's a palpable exchange of power happening, and she can sense that it's centered around Lilian.     "... Why do you wish to speak with us?" She hovers around her chair, skin-crawlingly unpleasant feeling about the idea of sitting down, but feeling slowly eased into a conversation whether she wants to be or not. Her palms sweat, separated from her suitcase again, and with it, all of her hopes of anyone besides herself surviving the Storm. "What do you mean, 'wayward children'?"
Lilian Rook	'Two? My lady....'     In Lilian's panic, awaking without the sword that hadn't left her side since her childhood and remembering nothing but the blinding pain and restless dreams between then and the moment her fingers had grazed it last, the words exchanged between Manus leaders had failed to pierce through her hysteria. With Vertin within reach, Schneider within sight, and the gravity of her situation sinking in, it's those words that finally rip through the leaden haze that clings persistently to her senses, and sting her eyes with their pinholes of light.     Two of worth means 'of worth to the Manus Vindictae', the infamous arcanist-only faction of racial supremacist terrorists. Traitor though she may be, Schneider is an arcanist, of prior distinguished service, and meddling schemer of the Foundation as she may be in turn, Vertin is an arcanist as well, uniquely impervious to the single most powerful tool of the Manus Vindictae's orchestrated chaos. Her stupid little joke about being the ritual sacrifice turns to ash on her tongue and makes her gag.     All this time, Lilian's fumblings with the concept of arcanists, her flustering at being thought one, her leaky fixation on the makings-of, and her lonely obsession with those who earn the name, could be taken in many ways, charitable and uncharitable. In a singular moment, any room for doubt as to what she personally believed all along is erased. Lilian's wide eyes count one arcanist, then two, and then remember Forget-Me-Not's orders to the crowd to kill her with an accusing-terrified stare. Then, wordless horror seizes her throat too tightly to breathe.     Lilian tears her gaze from his face and casts it frantically around the room; and then anyone can see that she spares no time for the lords and ladies at the long table, but counts the human men in the room instead. From the instant she first recognizes their clothes, the fear that already grips her climbs rapidly out of control, higher and higher towards heart-stopping delirium. She frantically reaches for her sidearm, misses completely, fumbles a second time in her terror, and then feels her fingers slip from the grip a third time, dizzy, weak and shaking. Tears spring to her eyes as she struggles pull herself upright and buckles under the weight of vertigo instead, slowly losing the fight to hold them back as uncontrollable hyperventilation only makes matters worse.     She murmurs to herself, rambling and frantic, growing louder as the plantal bars bend and louder still as Vertin moves to leave. Lilian clutches at the offered arm as if she means to tear it off, all but sobbing in the throes of hysterical terror "Ná, ná ná ná ná! Ná! Níl! Ní chreidim é! Rud ar bith ach-- Is tromluí é seo! Níl sé seo ag tarlú! Impím ort! Ná déan é!"     'The traitor stays. The likes of her will never be welcome at our table.'     The obvious implication goes off on a delay. Lilian looks to Arcana despite herself, expecting her to correct Forget Me Not, and then when she doesn't, Lilian gags on the feeling of relief. Her legs wobble under her when Vertin helps her finally get to her feet. When her trembling fist wipes her lips, she feels blearily grateful for the fact that she hadn't eaten all day, and then suddenly, searingly complicated about her choice in lipstick.
Lilian Rook	'Na bi buartha. You may; and then, sit, as the Guiding One instructed.'     Lilian's lips part, but the words don't come out. She glances up at Forget Me Not impulsively, but her face quickly goes from deathly pale to flushed queasy-angry, and she glances away mortified instead. Her teeth grind together in her fuming silence, which she keeps up until Vertin approaches her again with Night Mist, then broken by a ragged gasp of overpowering catharsis that accompanies her wrenching the weapon into her own arms with such intense focus that her motor coordination briefly reaches 'passable'.     That, and "Thank you . . .", babbled half-consciously with a sword nearly as tall as she is clutched to her chest like a stuffed animal. It isn't clear whether she intends to thank Vertin or Forget Me Not by it.     Over the ensuing minutes, Lilian's thoughts finally stop racing too fast for her to parse any single one of them, and so she wonders at what the Manus Vindictae intend by giving her back her weapon. She herself has no idea what left her feeling like every neuron in her body had been ripped out, turned around, then shoved back inside in a hurry, so it strikes her as possible that they're just that confident in whatever method they've employed. What matters is that compensating for Night Mist's weight actually makes her somewhat steadier on her feet; as if part of her disorientation was for having a limb amputated shortly before. Holding it tightly to her body, the etchings react to the poorly controlled and badly fluctuating current of magic throughout her body, asynchronously flickering every line of the blade down to the archaic inscription at the base.     The bloody-red strobing of Death to those who have wronged my people alongside Lilian's mistrustful glare would perhaps be somewhat threatening if she didn't need Vertin's help to even make it to the table. Only once she has the relief of a solid seat underneath her and a tabletop to brace against does she finally try to see who else is here, parsing Druvis first, then the rest of the Manus after, with her fingertips holding up her forehead. Her elbow hovers just short of actually touching the table out of ironclad habit.     "What was that you . . . ?" Lilian begins to say to Vertin, but the effort taken out of her by the words discourages her from even finishing the sentence. She tries to gather herself up and focus on recovering as fast as possible instead. It occurs to her that Vertin might even be stalling for time, for that reason. Instead, she drums up the only thing she can think of to aid her in that task, which is also the very same thing that Lilian burningly wants to know.     Gathering up her energy, Lilian asks "Why am I here?"
Schneider Greco	Druvis opens the cage for all three of the prisoners; Forget Me Not hastens to clarify who is worthy and who is not; and Arcana, seeming to take notice of neither of them, makes a gentle conducting gesture.      Black slime slithers from a corner of the room, oozes up the thorny cage, "cuffs" the unworthy girl's wrists to the bars, and tightens until the wood creaaaaks softly. "Nnnh...!" the girl whimpers. Schneider never would, but Schneider isn't yet awake behind that girl's eyelids.      "It is thine to reject, Lady Vertin," she says of the apology, soft-bright-eyed and smiling as unblemished as ever.      To both of them: ""Are we not equals here? You may be armed howsoever you please."      And to Lilian in particular: "Sacrifice?" That one word is edged with unsettling sultry half-laughter. "You are safe, Lady Rook. Never have I shed a drop of arcanists' blood in vain. Were it needed, I would bleed for thee." She says that just as a black droplet audibly splats against the hard floor.      The Guiding One steps aside and motions to the banquet table with an outstretched hand. The head of the table must be reserved for her, but without a throne, it's hard to tell which end is the head and which is the foot.      Schneider, not that many of the Manus might bother to look at her, is just then starting to stir and become Schneider again.      'I won't take my eyes off you'      "Mmmnh... many have said this, my dear lord," she says, trying and falling somewhere far short of humor. She can't look at Lilian. Her eyes, after leaving Vertin, settle on Druvis instead. There's an uneasy-sorry look in them. Does Druvis really want to be here for what will happen next?      - - - -      "Look at me, my-lord. Be thankful you're important. They will make you kill me," she had said. Her voice was almost lower, then, than the footsteps thundering down the corridors towards them. "It's their way. I've seen it. But listen..."      - - - -      "Mannaggia, what has you so afraid...?" Schneider murmurs under her breath as Lilian gets out of the cage, and tests her own bonds with no real hope.      Arcana doesn't look at her. Her eyes are for Lilian instead, soft nectar-gold that could swallow all the fear in the world.      "Lady Lilian? Please, let thine heart be soothed," she says, taking one of Lilian's hands in hers, and wrapping the other arm around Lilian's shoulders, and thus pressing her body against Lilian's side. In her skin there is too much softness and too much warmth.      Her voice vibrates against Lilian's shoulder and comes out too close to her ear, while black trickles down both of them gently. "You are loved. Yours were at odds with mine once, but now no more." Those hands of hers guide Lilian's shoulders down to sit in a chair, and then stroke up, over Lilian's cheek, and at last rest in her hair.      By way of answering both of their questions, she breathes across the table to Vertin while resting her hands on her ally:      "I will ask you a few questions that you might answer," she says,      "and then, you will both decide to join my Manus. Cxar la nokton estas vere bona, kaj mi resanigos vin de via kolero."
Timekeeper	Vertin and Schneider may be in agreement on what has to happen for their survival from here on, but Lilian wasn't conscious for the hissed conversation between them only minutes earlier. Among the dangers and unpredictabilities of their capture, Lilian's mental state is partially a mystery to Vertin right now, thrown off by stressors she's never seen her encounter before. The unknown magic that knocked Lilian down, the attachment to her sword and the emotional blow struck by their captors' unexpected magnanimity in returning it, swirling around the sentiments that she and Lilian have shared about the Manus in private talks over the past months.     Lilian is someone they have to save. Emotionally unsteady as she already is, Vertin is ready to accept that they may need to save her 'from herself' too. In addition to each of Schneider's tiny movements-- if anyone could miraculously escape from the chains of the Manus Vindictae, she would believe Schneider can-- Vertin intently watches Lilian, catching where her eyes stray to the loudest humans in the room first before the arcanists at the table.     She isn't the only one watching Lilian, though. "Why am I here?"     "Where else would you be?" Forget Me Not takes a seat further down from the head of the table, leaning forwards to keep eye contact with Lilian with his fingers laced. "Chicago is a city of many wonders, to be sure, but precious few whose doors are open to us and ours. Wouldn't you agree, my lady? How did you find your visit to the Windy City?"     Vertin's eyes widen slightly, sliding towards Lilian. Forget Me Not knowing when Vertin did not feels like another declaration of ideological tug of war between them, and she's already two notches down. "When did you come to Chicago on your own?"     "Quiet yourself, Miss Vertin. I'm interested in her opinion, not yours." "Never have I shed a drop of arcanists' blood in vain."     Vertin hasn't touched any of the silverware at her place on the table, spine stiffly away from the back of the chair with no intent to relax as invited. Her hands curl into fists, fingers scraping across the wooden tabletop, gripped by a sudden flare of anger.     "What of the many arcanists who have lost their lives to the Storm? Were they less 'worthy' in your eyes? You can't tell me you care for every arcanist-- I know their names, a handful of the uncountably many arcanists killed by the end of every era." ". . . and then, you will both decide to join my Manus."     "Will that be ours to refuse as well?" Fear and anger coaslesce into brittle evenness in Vertin's voice, staring at Arcana. She doesn't flinch at her draping herself across Lilian, and she really really hopes Lilian doesn't either. "Cxar la nokton estas vere bona, kaj mi resanigos vin de via kolero."     What comes next shatters her rigidity like an electric shock through her system, both eyes exposed when she raises her face. The language sounds like alien phonemes in random orders, blurring in the processing center of your brain like speech from a dream, but it's unmistakeably the same one Vertin used. "What...?!"     Another notch lost by her reaction. The faintly desperate surprise drains away from her speech, but settles as an intense spark in her eyes. "... Alright. Ask your questions, then. In return, I have questions of my own I would like answered."
Ein	Of the things that Druvis will not touch, exactly what she asked for with a splash of special care rates among what she will. Reaching out, she plucks the top layer of the barcloth with the burned-fingered hand of hers, lifting smoothly but with a pensive-critical look at the action worn across the visible part of her face. She overcomes it quickly, and as she shifts and lifts the cloth to her face to wipe away the soot and be healed, 'The traitor stays. The likes of her will never be welcome at our table.' Druvis does not pause the wiping of her face, curtained by the cloth, and feeling the soft sting of antiseptic and herbs. The remedy of it works, sooths skin and numbs nerve, and the cloth is as drape over her lost maskpiece, but... It unsuits her. The cloth quickly changes from potion-dripped to ash-stained, and when Druvis folds it over, the daubing smears more than it clears, but the damage to her face in splinter and burn is healed, as is the searing to her fingers. It hides her face again, the way her lips work and curl at her own thoughts, and then she settles, quarterfolded cloth smudging off the edges of the mask and coming away dripping black. "You added extra." She adds, when she returns the cloth, as it summarizes all that he did. She moves to lift wand-cane, to bar the cage back up her own way, and retain some control of the situation when the moonlight glow of her staff is pre-empted by the conducting of another, and Druvis watches instead Arcana make her own will manifest. With a creak she lowers hand, resting palm on the wings of wandtop, and drags gaze from Schneider -- To Vertin, one and one half eye dryly curious. Lilian was the final unknown among them for Druvis III, but her surprise is open when Lilian cries for, and then makes request of (through Vertin) her sword, and such is granted. Lifting gaze to Arcana, Druvis tries to imagine why - was Lilian some critical member or recruit that had been mixed in? Captured? Wasn't she fighting with them? The idea of 'traitor' swam about her head, and Druvis found herself sitting at her place among the table automatically, the haughtiness of a triumphant and lightly-bloodied champion returning favored to the table bubbling up from subconscious as her thoughts continued to race. Stunned at the whole procession, the restoration of blade, Druvis ends looking at Lilian. The sword - and the words Lilian speaks - tickles something in the back of Druvis' thoughts, and she finally finds voice if only to ask a question. "You. . ." Lilian, by tilt of mask, and lock of eye and a half. "Are from the old country? That tongue was my mother's," And she trails off. It wasn't hers. 'Why am I here?' Druvis looks to Arcana, facing half-mask of burnt bramble to the rest. 'Cxar la nokton estas vere bona, kaj mi resanigos vin de via kolero.' Entertaining thoughts of sparing herself, Druvis slowly slides her eyes from Arcana again, conducted to see Lilian and Vertin by attention and glancing at Schneider beyond. Could she do more than listen?
Lilian Rook	Lilian doesn't care which seat she takes. The nearest one, if possible, would be ideal. Even if she has to be seated practically elbow to elbow with the Manus, it would still be relief to the instincts that still scream at her to be anywhere but on the ground. As out-of-their context as they are, Lilian takes those warning sirens as proof that she is still in posession of her senses; telling herself that this is no longer a combat situation would be a lie.     'Sacrifice?'     Hearing the word said back to her in Arcana's voice makes her feel humiliated. Trying to gather herself again as she slumps into her seat, Lilian realizes a few seconds later that the humiliation she feels isn't the sort that comes from being made fun of, but for saying something childish and inappropriate.     'You are safe, Lady Rook. Never have I shed a drop of arcanists' blood in vain. Were it needed, I would bleed for thee.'     §Don't fall for it. You know better. You've been taught allabout this; you could describe the exact psychological impact you'd hope to elicit in their position, even. Whatever it is that they want, it begins with you getting comfortable.§     Lilian takes a deep breath, holds it for half the length she'd like to before it makes her dizzy, and then tries to square her shoulders against the back of her chair while staring firmly a blank stretch of tablecloth. "Vertin. Did you repeat my name at some point they would have heard?" she says.     'Mannaggia, what has you so afraid...?'     Lilian's teeth click together. Her face pales again by a half-shade. Her stoic insistence on controlling the context; of not letting anything the Manus say mean anything to her, reveals itself for how shaky it truly is, and falls apart. "Leave me alone." comes out scared and hoarse. She closes her eyes to try and shut the feeling out.     §Stop. Listen to Vertin. She sounds confident. Angry, even. Listen to the way she's speaking to them. She has the least power of anyone in this situation, so she's trusting you to keep it together. She must know--§     Lilian opens them again only to glance in Vertin's direction despite herself. Worried. Suspicious. Anxious. Perhaps even slightly ashamed.     'Will that be ours to refuse as well?'     "Vertin." Lilian says, too nervous to be as firm as she'd like. She moves her tongue to say something else, but the words dissolve into white noise before she speaks them. She sways unsteadily in her seat, watching the table as if it might bite her, fightning not to prop herself against it.     'Lady Lilian?'     Vertin's beautiful hopes are dashed. Lilian tenses as if the muzzle of a gun were pressed to her spine; a conscious understanding of a threat Vertin can't see from her angle, rather than the instinctive one of a sharp blade or a hot iron.     'You are loved.'     And yet Lilian leans her unsteady weight on that woman's body as if it were the same as the one she wishes it was. Her hand squeezes Arcana's once before she stops herself. She only freezes when the her fingers wander into her hair.     "Please forgive any offense if I say that it seems very sudden that I am." she says, meaning one thing and thinking another.
Schneider Greco	Arcana's hand squeezes Lilian's back, with a wordlessly warm noise of affection. Through her slick glove, the flesh squishes under her grasp. She is encouraged to lean back further, still further...      "It offendeth me not that the world hath failed you. May you become accustomed to better," she says.      Vertin asks if they can refuse to join the Manus. Arcana smiles, wholesomely, unwholesomely. "Of course thou mayest," she says, tracing her fingers along the curve of Lilian's ear. "As easily as rain may fall up. But I would mourn for your departure. I adore thine heart, and how steadily it beats; that which glitters nestled in thy cranium belongen to me."      Her fingers trace down to touch, for a moment, Lilian's lips. Her eyes follow. "And the homage of thy tongue... it is music to me, wayward child. That was no incantation, was it? For what purpose but to please me do you speak it?"      The question about 'the arcanists who have lost their lives to the Storm'... Arcana does not answer, just yet, but her lips turn upwards.      "My questions for the Lady Vertin are three. I ask little. But I ask not to be deceived. Should you weave an inopportune story, there must be a disciplining," she coos, as sweetly as she says anything else.      Schneider breathes shallowly where she sits back against the thorns, her wrists still tied to the birdcage's bars with goo. Her eyes follow Druvis. Anyone else could assume they follow resentfully.      There's a lot she wants to say to her. Little of it fit to be overheard here. "Do not blame yourself, my-lady," she murmurs instead. "that your wands were-not quite enough." It could sound backhanded if it were not sincere.      But as ever, she is beneath the Lady Arcana's attention.      "First," she purrs, and the look in her eyes says this is answering Vertin too. Crrrack--krrrnchglrglrgkglrk, and the wand-spike is drawn out, only to be held passively aside as it obscenely drips by Lilian's shoulder.      "What is the purpose for the Foundation to create the Storm?"
Lilian Rook	'Where else would you be?'     That man again. Lilian had been so desperate to lay eyes on him that she felt ashamed of herself, then so jilted by his very existence that it shamed her further. Now he speaks her family's tongue and freely offers her back what she would give anything for and acts as if it were all blessedly inevitable. She suppresses the urge to grind her teeth with her favoured variety of Britishism.     "Chained up in the basement like that other poor woman, I imagine. Or else I've drank too much at the Sothebies' and my wife would wake me up instead." says Lilian, with a gallows affect that couldn't possibly be meant to impress anyone. "Who knows? Perhaps this is all another one of Mesmer's horrid little diagnostics and I'll wake up with a stun gun being waved in my face while someone shouts 'animal'! That'd be a sight more likely than this, don't you think?"     Listing off alternative possibilities is good. It's grounding. It's an ideal opportunity to inventory both her memory and her awareness of her surroundings. It isn't totally dissimilar to what Sonetto would be repeating right about now.     'Chicago is a city of many wonders, to be sure, but precious few whose doors are open to us and ours. Wouldn't you agree, my lady? How did you find your visit to the Windy City?'     She's so close to making it. Her head still swims too severely to laugh, but she gets all the way through "I'm afraid I wouldn't know. The only you and yours I've met has been right here." without stumbling. She was so, so very close.     'When did you come to Chicago on your own?'     Lilian meets Vertin's stare, and flinches back from it like an accusation. She clutches the sword to her chest with her free arm, seeking reassurance from a thousand year-old relic still speckled in half-wet gore instead. It's anyone's guess how she doesn't cut herself.     "The day before yesterday. Why? Did I break some sort of Foundation rule?" she says, worried-sullen. "I didn't mean anything by it. We spoke of it once before, remember? You said it would be a good idea if I went and got some perspective; outside Laplace."     'I'm interested in her opinion, not yours.'     §My opinion? You can't be serious.§     "I won't miss it." Lilian says. The little downturn in her enunciation suggests it to the the end of a sentence. A bitter-fearful glance at the faraway clusters of humans makes the corner of her lips twitch as a comma instead. "In fact, I think you might be more fond of it than I."     'You. . . Are from the old country? That tongue was my mother's'     Lilian never actually fought Druvis. Two and two are added so fast that it drives the wind out of her. She mutters to herself just to have somewhere to vent her disappointment before it turns livid. Lilian says "To think. I told those recalciltrant mouthbreathers to kill you. Do they think this is a game?" just for herself, and then the rest for Druvis after, finally raising her stare.     "Not really. I'm just not allowed to be from the new country." Lilian says.     Her mood takes a turn for the worse at that. Her attention drifts to Druvis' wand, then Forget Me Not across her, then to Schneider, the crab-masked man, the painting and the stuffed toy. Irish, Sicilian, Japanese, not even human--     "Would she happen to be Polish." Lilian sighs, staring at the vampire. Her voice rasps. "That's very disappointing."
Ein	'that your wands were-not quite enough.' Druvis' head hangs, eye a sort of resentful-guilty mix, blinked down so that even her gnarled branches seem crooked and wistful. "They were never meant to cross purposes." She admits, soulful and honest. "But they were also never meant to hesitate for the carver's hands. I. . . am inspired by everyone I make for." I am inspired by you. "So," She runs out of words in her throat. Swallowing doesn't bring more. Working jaw, and opening eyes, to draw wand close to chest, she rolls hand around the top of the winged cane and frowns. "I don't blame you either." 'Do they think this is a game?' Lilian is a strange bitter-citrus note in the moment, shocking and refreshing and drawing of an automatic, out-of-pocket "They often do?" before turning away and biting lip where only the Crab Lord can see her cheek and she doesn't think the Crab Lord can see people's faces at all. Aloof but only in a broad cone, Druvis has to balance everything and cannot even begin to line it all up. 'Not really. I'm just not allowed to be from the new country.' "Mmmh." Rolls out a complex note. Sympathy, empathy, pain of her own, pain shared. "The opposite." She answers for herself, knowing she cannot understand and pressing hand to mirrorglass between them in spirit while fingers stroke gently along the crescent on her wand. "And somehow, you find us in Chicago." She speaks, dry, to Lilian's wonderment if the vampire is Polish.
Timekeeper	"You added extra."     "A fraction, my lady," Forget Me Not says with a bow, tucking the soiled cloth into his vest pocket. The humans roving around the periphery are unfit to even be commanded to dispose of it. "Of what I would do to avenge your dignity. Those who hurt you will die screaming." "Did you repeat my name at some point they would have heard?"     The rush of relief that Vertin feels when Lilian starts talking in more coherent sentences again only shows on her face for a second, but even that's evidence of the state she's in. Since regaining consciousness, Lilian's been either quiet or panicked, and with Lilian steadied enough to ask such a mundanely practical question, some of Vertin's fragility is smoothed over.     She shakes her head tightly, eyes towards the balcony. "I can't recall. The Concord would have, regardless."     The other arcanists have mostly been embroiled in their own hushed chatter while shooting glances over at the captives, but the little vampire girl pipes up with a clatter of her fork on the wood. "I said that irritating Araneae was bad news, didn't I? How terribly awful. Who knows what those traitors are blabbering about now? Swine. Insects. Voyeuristic scum."     The crab-faced man dabs away foam that built up at the corner of his mouth with his napkin, growly-voiced but polite-mannered. "Lyra is right. The way the chips fell, those foreigners were weak-hearted enough to abandon the mission for a hired gun. We were better off on our own."     The lady in the painting shifts, hand shifting onto her cheek, with her formerly-cheek-eye bleeding through the paint of her hand, upturned thoughtfully. "Oh, but they were such pretty creatures, weren't they? We still ought to kill them ourselves, so the rain doesn't put their bodies to waste. The golden one was enchanting...."     Forget Me Not raises a hand, not shushing the others, but drawing some kind of rhetorical tide of attention towards himself. "The matter of our relationship with the Concord will be discussed at another time. Dear Lyra, I assure you the traitors will not be forgiven." "Vertin."     Lilian's fearful reaction to Vertin's bitter retort cuts the legs out from under her. She sets her jaw, trying to withstand the upheavel of emotions she feels towards Arcana and the environment as a whole, mastering it to transform into effortless neutrality and soothing reliability, as always. "... Lilian."
Timekeeper	With more and more people at the table, some of the more boisterous humans find their way into the inner orbit around the centerpiece. A particularly celebratory group, half masked and half still with their faces visible, riled up by alcohol and aimless shoulder-pushes, recursively dares each other closer to spill towards the cage like an incursion of locusts. Schneider and Vertin are the only ones likely to recognize their faces, as men deeply invested in gambling on the results of the bloodsports. They hoot and holler, hands carelessly cut and bleeding on the thorns that line the outside of the cage as they grip the vines to shake them, with the champion bitch of the stage taken down at last. Forget Me Not pays them no mind. "I adore thine heart, and how steadily it beats; that which glitters nestled in thy cranium belongen to me."     Vertin narrows her eyes, uneasily disbelieving Arcana's smooth reassurance and still unable to come up with any intention to glean from her explanation. Her voice is a little softer noe. "I don't understand." "For what purpose but to please me do you speak it?"     She really should know better than to blurt out information that she otherwise wouldn't need to offer up for Arcana's dissection, but in the grand mystery of her own life, this is the closest Vertin's ever felt to getting an answer. Her resistance slips with a short gasp.     "I believe I learned it from my mother. I've never heard it spoken otherwise. How do you...?" "Please forgive any offense if I say that it seems very sudden that I am."     Crossways, the love Arcana shows is supported by Forget Me Not's unhesitating approval, Arcana's echoing shadow of this era. "It only seems so now. Lady Arcana's love is eternal, unsubject to the petty moment to moment of the clock's ticking-- her people are always loved, and only the mere world claims otherwise."     Vertin can't sit by without intervening in the naked cult manipulation tactics playing out in front of her, with Arcana hanging off of Lilian's arm and Forget Me Not crooning in her ear, in her vulnerable state. "Claiming to love someone is simple. You've suckered many arcanists before into your ranks with shallow promises like that. I've yet to see any actions from you to that point." "The only you and yours I've met has been right here."     "Just so," Forget Me Not smoothly replies to both simultaneously, with a faint curling smile on his lips. "Why? Did I break some sort of Foundation rule?"     Vertin shakes her head slightly, feeling a twinge of regret at slipping with her tone in a way Lilian's apparently sensitive to. "Not at all. I suppose there wasn't time for us to talk about it. ... I am glad you found a chance to."
Timekeeper	"In fact, I think you might be more fond of it than I."     But what inopportune timing Lilian chose, only a day before the end of the world began. Vertin winces, trying to play catchup in the conversation and undercut Forget Me Not as much as she can.     "If I am, then it is only as the scab becomes more fond of the knife than raw skin." Forget Me Not's tone is bleedingly sympathetic, far too specific to come across as anything but a comrade in arms, as if he was walking alongside her those two days she spent in the city.     "This wretched city is a project of humanity. As well you saw. What they built here, this concrete graveyard of suffocation and depravity, is their pride and joy. In their world, we can only claw and punch for space to breathe."     "That isn't true. There aren't only humans in this era, nor is every human cruel. This city is Bellwhistle's too, and her human friends love her. You'd kill them all for not abiding your ideology." "And how has Chicago treated her in return, as thanks for her part in it?" ". . ."     With Vertin silent again, Forget Me Not turns his attention back to Lilian like it'd never left. "Although, forgive my presumption in claiming that you would be unfamiliar with the knife, my lady. You've known a lifetime of humanity's hateful rejection, have you not?" "But I ask not to be deceived. Should you weave an inopportune story, there must be a disciplining,"     Vertin tenses, acutely aware of her surroundings and her complete lack of leverage. Whatever Arcana may mean by them being 'equals' here, it doesn't extend to not coercing her for answers. "What are your three questions?" "What is the purpose for the Foundation to create the Storm?"     The very first one causes her to stagger, gasping in sharp disbelief. Her declarations all twist upwards at the end, questioningly uncertain. "W-what? The Foundation did no such thing. It is the Manus Vindictae that created the Storm-- you...."
Schneider Greco	"They wear well to my hands, my-la-dy," Schneider breathes to Druvis, dissipated but almost pleasant. 'Wear', and not 'wore'. "I think, they have given me an in-spir-a-tion too. Mhmhmhm..."      It was nice, while it lasted.      'W-what? The Foundation did no such thing'      Arcana's lips twitch downwards. She gestures slightly with her wand--      Krrr-crunchh, krkk.      But this time the noise isn't coming from her. Behind Vertin, Schneider very nearly screams. The noise that comes out of her instead, a hollow-whistling hoarse breath, might be worse.      "Ghhh- ahh-!! Merda, what do you want with me?! I haven't--"      The ooze cuffing Schneider's wrist to the cage has constricted to crush her right hand's bones, digging in. Her lower arm too is a shape it shouldn't be.      "I adore you, but I do-not adore your words, Lady Vertin. They ring not true," says Lady Arcana serenely, not lifting her eyes from Vertin's. "I pray your next answer will satisfy me. Until you are of the Manus, it profits me little to answer yours."      - - - -      "Don't forget, my-lord. Shoot me through the heart. You must. Right here... on the left of my chest," she was saying, just before they came. "My-la-dy Druvis... please. If you feel regret, do-not breathe a word of this. Just take us back--"      - - - -      But had Schneider foreseen this? The wild-eyed way she gasps for breath makes it hard to believe so.      The Lady Arcana steps beside Lilian, and then leans back across her, and drapes across her lap for seemingly no reason but to have a ready place to sit. Her arm across her shoulders holds the wand that still drips black; her skull-borehole oozes it down to mix seamlessly with the gloss and color of Lilian's hair.      "I have rescued all those who reach out for my love. That is more than you, or the Foundation, might say. But never-mind these things, Lady Vertin:"      "Second. The Foundation experiments on the orphans of arcanists, to what end?"
Lilian Rook	'They often do?'     "Only when I insist otherwise." Lilian all but spits. No matter how powerful Druvis is, which she has no reason to believe is anything but considerably, seeing her stroll back with only a few burns and a broken mask to show for it aligns her words and her thoughts into a single ugly outpouring, curt as it may be.     "I know what they can do if they try. When it came to you, I imagine they felt sympathetic instead."     'The opposite.'     Lilian looks aside, and tries strenuously to pretend not to know what that means.     'And somehow, you find us in Chicago.'     "There's no 'somehow' about it." Lilian says. "It was inevitable the year became nineteen-twenty-eight, and the lot of us are mere mortals are only the last to know. That's all that miracles are." Shifting her arm to be able to press her fingertips to her brow, Lilian tries to massage away the early throbbing of a headache that is far too deep inside her skull to be helped. She sighs, quieter and quieter, no longer interested in being understood; only in the acrid, blackening moment, "Or when it turned twenty-sixty-six plus seven-hundred and nineteen."     'It offendeth me not that the world hath failed you. May you become accustomed to better'     "I meant--"     Torn from her wallowing, Lilian is first nakedly frustrated by the deflection. By two words, she questions whether rebuking it would get her anywhere at all. Everything about 'Lady Arcana' is so offputting, so alien to every context around them both, and everything that pins her to this place and time, that she can't even decide if she means it, if she's truly oblivious, or if--     The squeeze on her hand makes her want to believe it. Every other part of her, from her good sense to her worst urges, still hopes not to. She splits the difference with a ragged inhalation, and then silence.     §You know better. Come on. Please.§     '... Lilian.'     "I'm sorry." Lilian says, and swallows hard. She could still look composed, were she not clinging to her weapon as if she could squeeze its hand for comfort. "Everything's just a bit jumbled up. At the moment. I'll sort it out."     'Claiming to love someone is simple. You've suckered many arcanists before into your ranks with shallow promises like that. I've yet to see any actions from you to that point.'     §She's right. You already know she is. Were all those hapless idiots who put on masks and turned into monsters 'loved' too? These people were perfectly happy to lump me in with the others and watch the mob tear me apart at their pleasure. Vertin loves arcanists. And they love her too. As for me, these people just want something.§     The dry rationalization that Lilian silently half-mouths her way through, which should have been a buttress against the way her heart lurches one way as her world sways another, serves only to make her feel worse. Lilian closes to think of the Ainsworth office, and tastes only bile.     'Just so'     "Well we can't all be blessed with fashion sense and affable demeanour now can we?" Lilian bites back at Forget Me Not. All she accomplishes is sounding bitter about the wrong thing. "I'm not an idiot. You know who I am and where I'm from, so you know I'm not really an arcanist, too. 'You and yours' hide in places like this from people like me; of course I couldn't meet them if I tried." Choosing to direct that bitterness away from Vertin is an act of guilty conscious so pointless that it is tantamount to an act of petty self-destruction. If Vertin isn't to blame, then who else is but her? "Whoever you are, you'll regret making fun of me."
Lilian Rook	'I don't understand.'     Lilian tries to catch Vertin's eye. She tries to shake her head as subtly as she can. She shouts with her eyes 'They want me to ask, because they want you to ask about me', and all of the 'Don't fall for it' that she wishes she could cling tighter to on her own. She has to believe that much.     'And the homage of thy tongue... it is music to me, wayward child. That was no incantation, was it? For what purpose but to please me do you speak it?'     It's too late to jerk her hand away from Arcana now. It'd only give away more than what the sudden spike in her heart rate already does. Lilian's eyes shoot open wide, pupils constricted to points, before she even fully processes the woman named Arcana's meaning. Her lips part, prepared to spit forth the most believable deflection that she can think of in haste. Arcana's fingers reach them first. Lilian's jaw twitches as if to bite down in panic. How Arcana could tell is an utterly critical question that she doesn't have anywhere near the luxury of finding an answer to. The fact that she noticed at all turns most of what she had prepared to white noise in her brain.     Lilian would like to believe that it's something about Arcana's unearthly presence that scares her into answering. But held like this, set before Verting as if to be accused by her, and held tightly by Arcana as if to defend her from that accusation, even she isn't quite so delusional as to believe it seriously.     "Once I saw how the Foundation treated Vertin, I decided that if I was going to use magic in front of everyone, I'd make it clear whose side I was on." says Lilian. Her eyes avoid Vertin's. The words follow one another with a sense of quietly measured sickness; of leaning over a bloody sink and waiting numbly for whichever drip will be the last. "I thought if I kept quiet then I could get away with being 'just how they do it over there', and that thought upset me because it was cowardly."     "By the time I realized that nobody even bothered to check, it was already too late to stop."
Lilian Rook	'If I am, then it is only as the scab becomes more fond of the knife than raw skin.'     §Stop. Stop acting like that. Stop saying it like that. I don't care. You don't care. What do you want from me?§     Lilian can barely summon disgust for the visceral feedback of 'Lady Arcana' withdrawing her wand-- whatever that thing is-- from whatever was supposed to be inside her beautiful head. Held there like an injured dove by the woman that Forget Me Not so clearly worships, spoken to as an object of adoration-- a symbol of wounded virtue, as-presented-- despite how everything was merely hours ago, Lilian balances so precariously on a nameless edge of her own devising that to think about anything would take reserves that she doesn't have.     'This wretched city is a project of humanity. As well you saw.'     §Don't you start talking to me about roads and buildings and what gets to stay because it was already here. I'll know it. I'll know what you are.§     'What they built here, this concrete graveyard of suffocation and depravity, is their pride and joy.'     §You're too late. You're five years too late. I'm not some dewy-eyed waif covered in bruises to be ushered in from the cold. All of this is trite. Banal. Everybody knows it.§     'In their world, we can only claw and punch for space to breathe.'     Lilian's grip on Night Mist finally loosens, if only just by a hair. The way it slides on her lap until the point finally touches the floor should rightly slice right through her thigh. "You must think I'm as stupid as the Concord." she says, and forces herself to believe there is enough momentum for the dry monosyllabic laugh she pushes out.     'That isn't true. There aren't only humans in this era, nor is every human cruel. This city is Bellwhistle's too, and her human friends love her.'     She attempts to cash in on Vertin's, too. Even if she feels like she's a million miles away, just down the table like that. "Besides, you've had no issues with telling those gullible imbeciles that they're 'the good ones', right? There's nothing more intoxicating for someone spoiled than for the 'noble oppressed' to exalt their petty problems by comparison to their struggles."     'And how has Chicago treated her in return, as thanks for her part in it?'     '. . .'     Then Lilian looks to Vertin, waiting for her reply, and the longer the waits, the more unsteady her expression gets. It says 'and?', then 'come on, say something', and then 'that's it?', and then her eyes get wider and her breathing gets shallower and Lilian's stare screams 'surely you have more than that, right?', and the idea that she has to protect Vertin, of all people, from this, drives her to a stiffly forced scoff and a monotone recitation of "Forgive me, but pretending to be addicted to that drug until I can cynically stab you in the back for the first person who can give me even more attention is against my principles, you know. I'd rather not be lumped in with those rabid dogs."     Something about that sentence didn't need to be said, but Lilian waves it away as improvisation in her mind. She urges Vertin with her eyes to get back on her proverbial feet. "It's precisely because I respect the magnitude of the difficulties you face that I won't humiliate myself by craving a part in them."
Lilian Rook	'Although, forgive my presumption in claiming that you would be unfamiliar with the knife, my lady. You've known a lifetime of humanity's hateful rejection, have you not?'     Lilian stops dead.     §Cold read.§     "Cold read."     She believes it too, for a moment. For a few more hopeful seconds, her fingers don't tremble where Arcana holds them. Then the lurid pitch-black splat by her shoulder startles her into looking back. And then Lilian remembers Schneider.     Lilian stares at her, dizzy and frightened, not daring to ask the question. Her eyes jump back to Forget Me Not, but no words come to her in the moment. It's now that her body betrays her; first her breathing, fast and shallow as before, then the cold exhaustion in her muscles, trembling with a new surge of even deeper, more desperate reserves of adrenaline, and in the itching crackle of her nerves as every inch of her body feels frostbitten all at once.     §She wouldn't have. He doesn't.§     "And even if I had, it wouldn't have anything to do with this." Lilian says, queasy with bleak anticipation. Where she had affected vaguely sympathetic disdain with Vertin's help, now she shifts her weight to get her unsteady heels against the floor beneath the table, winding up like a cornered animal. "I had a bad day in Chicago because the humans thought I was one of you. Don't debase yourself with the comparison."     'What is the purpose for the Foundation to create the Storm?'     'W-what?'     "What?!"     Even under these conditions, those aren't words that Lilian could fail to hear. Perhaps because of them, she couldn't even if she tried. They're spoken so certainly, by someone who seems to know everything, and just so happen to fit the shadowed dent in her heart that already wanted to hear them. It's only Schneider's screams that scare her away from joining in on interrogating Vertin right on the spot; and those cause her to finally wrench her hand from Arcana's grasp, just so she can press both over her ears as if it would help at all.     §Don't fucking touch her! Leave her be! I don't care that she betrayed you; she doesn't deserve this! Stop or I'll make you!§     "Vertin just tell her the truth please!"     The stinging in her eyes comes faster than the words, and the words come faster than her dignity. For a second, all Lilian can process is her own laboured breathing and hammering heart and the pins and needles that shoot up and down her arms and legs at Schneider's gasps of agony, and then the sickening urge to cling to Arcana for comfort, as if Vertin were the cause of all this, seizes her with such delirious verisimilitude that it's all Lilian can do to hold still. Even the warm blackness oozing into her hair, trickling through her bangs and pooling on her brow, can't jolt her into action.
Lilian Rook	'Second. The Foundation experiments on the orphans of arcanists, to what end?'     Lilian's faith takes barely moments to fail her. The thought of Vertin lying to protect the Foundation's secrets a second time is seared into her mind's eye before it can even happen. Her hands drop down from her ears to clutch at her upper arms instead. Her sword slips, and the hilt catches between her elbow and her chest. Her own fingerprints smear ink stains on her bare skin. Her nails dig down until the black mingles with red.      For the second time, under this much stress and with this little power, the only thing Lilian can to think to do is to scrabble for handholds the whole way down, and so she casts her frantic, angry, tear-stricken look across the table and pleads with Forget Me Not over the only version of events that feels like it makes any sense.     "I get it! Okay?! I apologize! I was faking incantations and trying to act like an arcanist to the Foundation! But I only did it so I could be allowed to help Vertin, I swear! I wasn't trying to be an arcanist, or to join Manus Vindictae, or-- I was just curious!! Haven't you made your point by now?! I know my place! I'm sorry! So just say it! What do you want from me?!"
Timekeeper	"It was inevitable the year became nineteen-twenty-eight, and the lot of us are mere mortals are only the last to know."     Vertin and Lilian have talked a lot since meeting each other, over a meandering range of topics that time and time again synchronized on each other's wavelengths, and Vertin would have unhesitatingly called her a good friend. Now though, she's suddenly confronting the reality that she'd left a gulf between them, indicative of a miserable habit the longer she thinks about it. The quiet understandings they would come to weren't substitutes for conversations: ideology left gaps where personal attention ought to fill in. Her distant recognition of and fondness for Lilian's eccentricities clearly failed to guide her towards what actually mattered about them.     Now, Schneider's at risk for a secret that no one was open to hearing kindly, and Lilian is so desperately starved of something that every exchange with the Manus Vindictae leaves her more vulnerable, and what's worse is that they seem to understand what it is better than Vertin does. That dessicated tone of Lilian's sends a shiver down Vertin's spine, as if muffled by the steady drumbeat of rainfall.     "Was it so inevitable? We mere mortals rarely see beyond our own perspectives, and from here, I only see choices made by mortals that could have been different, but weren't. But could still." Druvis, too. Vertin's heart pounds as if it's straining to reach and grasp out of her chest. "Chicago is only a place. The way it was made, all our presences here, it was decided by people."     There has to be something she can do, that she's failing to do, in this moment. Schneider's hand is the only one Vertin feels like she can find a grip on, and only after she's told Vertin exactly what she needs to do. What's the point of being unbending in the Storm if everyone else is swept away? "At the moment. I'll sort it out."     "I know." Vertin gives her a weak smile. "I know you will." "Once I saw how the Foundation treated Vertin, I decided that if I was going to use magic in front of everyone, I'd make it clear whose side I was on."     Forget Me Not's eyes wander upwards, arcing thoughtfully across the shadowed ceiling of the Walden with a small smile on his face. "And whose side would that be? Miss Vertin retains the petty privilege of being the Foundation's lapdog; for those of us who refuse to sell our souls to humanity and trade gnosis for bureaucracy... well, you saw for yourself. It seems you know already where the lines of war are drawn."     Vertin shifts uncomfortably in her seat, focusing on the practical kindness of Lilian's efforts rather than the rhetoric Forget Me Not attempts to twist around on her. "There's no need to convince anyone of the difficulties arcanists face in daily life. The Foundation is imperfect, but it strives to change and adapt for the future, which the Manus Vindictae can never do. The Manus will only ever cannibalize its own members in your pursuit of purity, just as you've done with Schneider." "Our promises have always been kept. That girl betrayed us from the very beginning." "You'll find an excuse wherever it's convenient." "I assure you we've never mistreated one of our own, Miss Vertin. The tax of gratitude that the Foundation levies has no place here."
Timekeeper	"By the time I realized that nobody even bothered to check, it was already too late to stop."     There was a time, many months ago, where Lilian reassured Vertin unprompted that she wouldn't be ashamed of being thought as similar to her. Vertin had taken it at face value: arcanists are presumed shameful, and Lilian, navigating the social landscape of the Foundation, addressed the problem proactively upon seeing the intersectional overlap in their experiences. The idea that she was insecure about *earning* it....     "... It's not actually the case that all arcanum requires spoken incantations." Vertin starts awkwardly, seemingly not getting the point at first. "In some cases it may, due to one's individual afflatus, but to an extent, the medium of one's incantations is socialized by the surrounding arcanists' traditions. There's nothing to hold against you." "You must think I'm as stupid as the Concord."     Forget Me Not's eyebrows raise. "Hm?" When she elaborates, he wonders out loud, backing off of the topic and leaving all of her complaints and comparisons to the Concord unaddressed, "Are you spoiled, now...? But my lady, the blood hasn't even been scrubbed off of your shoes." "It's precisely because I respect the magnitude of the difficulties you face that I won't humiliate myself by craving a part in them."     This doesn't help Vertin get back on her feet at all. If anything, it makes her look a little queasier. Still, she can tell when Lilian is desperate for her to say something, and she has to... navigate this new wound of Lilian's, without explaining her own personal feelings to soothe it, because doing so would make the Manus Vindictae's arguments more effective in the moment. Can't she be honest some other way?     "There's no competition to be had. That the wounded of the world deserve equity is something that, superficially, we all agree on. The Manus believe in praise and revenge as the vehicle for short-term relief, rather than stability and care. Concord or arcanist, there's no future to be found in such a... shaky alliance."     Vertin closes her eyes and exhales, drained like she's running a marathon. "Don't debase yourself with the comparison."     "Is association with yourself often debasement?" Forget Me Not still remains unphased, even at Lilian's increasingly nervous rejections of his comments. Her building panic is met with his almost therapeutic patience, ever-smiling but with his eyes roaming across her face to take in her expressions.     He gets up from his chair, lowering his voice to a conversational volume and pacing slowly near the table. "I see, then. Let us take a hypothetical girl instead; a friend of yours, for the sake of argument. Envision this girl, turned away from every door, stared at on the streets and beaten when off of them. Her crime, her only crime, is the light within her, that can be dimmed or disguised, but never extinguished, and for this beacon, the world hates her. She would be entitled beyond all measure to hate them in return. This is an arcanist, my lady."     Forget Me Not turns around in his pacing, leaning down near the back of Lilian's chair to flank her across from Arcana. "I would debase myself to turn her away. You feel the same, do you not? Heartache felt on behalf of another is a signal from fate. One girl and a set of attentive eyes exposes humanity's true face. How dearly I would like for you and Lady Druvis to talk freely."
Timekeeper	"Ghhh- ahh-!!"     "Schneider!!! Stop hurting her!"     Vertin shoots up from her chair without thinking, lurching with her hands scrabbling against the table in a panic. Her heartbeat spikes, pounding in her ears and drowning out the jazz wafting through the Walden. Sitting on the edge of the bar, one of the masked humans pushes his palm up on his elbow to mime inverting it like the girl in the cage, and his companions burst into laughter.     When Schneider's cries of pain die down, Vertin's blurry vision slides from her back to Arcana. Her glare doesn't flicker at all over her tightly impassive expression. "Yes. I get it. I understand."     It wasn't just enough to tell the truth, but to spin a story that Arcana wanted to hear. 'Equals' be damned, whatever the Manus Vindictae said, their goals were the same in the end. They'd sooner kill her than let her walk free after questioning if she took their word and refused to join.     - - - -     "What?! I can't. Your life is too important. I won't..." Panic, revulsion, and terror in the lightless tunnels beneath that massive leafless tree. It was that pounding heartbeat, so close together that the organs might touch through their ribcages, that brought her back. ""Your heart... you're still...?"     - - - -     Schneider's plan had been risky from the start, but Arcana's very presence snares the few outs they might have played to tighter and tighter. Even the girl who wants to live more than anything must have a breaking point, and Vertin isn't sure she can risk playing around Arcana's rules long enough to bring her close to it. "Vertin just tell her the truth please!"     The magnitude of Lilian's fear surrounds Vertin like a fog. Embodied in Schneider and Lilian are the full extent of all the people depending on Vertin in this moment for their very lives, everyone within this room and out lost somewhere in Chicago. Time slows to a crawl, and even the small indicators of emotion and stress that reached the surface of Vertin's consciousness smooth away. "Okay." "Second. The Foundation experiments on the orphans of arcanists, to what end?"     "The School for the Primary Defense of Mankind takes in young arcanist orphans from each era to raise arcane soldiers dedicated to their cause," Vertin relays perfectly evenly, like she's reading off the newspaper. "And in attempts to devise an antibody immune to the Storm, known as Asymmetric Protein G. I am the only successful subject." "So just say it! What do you want from me?!"     It's true that whatever Forget Me Not wants, he wants more from Lilian than from Vertin. When she starts to cry, he hurries back closer to her and leans over her side, deliberately showing his hand in her field of vision before gently laying it on her wrist.     "Lady Rook, please, let your worry subside. During these short hours, there is nothing to fear from the world, while the triumph of the Manus Vindictae reigns over their sin and folly. What I want is no less than the dream of a world that fears you in equal measure to the fear it has inflicted."
Schneider Greco	'Asymmetric Protein G'      There is a moment where it seems like the Lady Arcana will accept Vertin's second answer. Her eyes rest so placidly across the table, from her perch across Lilian's lap.      - - - -      "My-lord, no-one wants to live as much as I. Trust me. Right here..." And she had taken a half-step back, still looking fearfully to Druvis, and touched two of Vertin's fingers to the left of her chest just before their enemies washed in.      - - - -      Krrrr--crnch, grk-crackk.      "Vaffanculo, vaffanculo..." Schneider barely mouths. Her left leg has followed her right arm, now, if one can bear to look. Her breaths are ragged but measured. Otherwise she'd scream.      Arcana's fingernails, through her gloves, roam through Lilian's goo-slicked hair.      "Hast that abominable worm misled you, Lady Vertin?" Arcana murmurs, pityingly. (Does she mean Schneider?) "Twice you speak untrue. What harm befalls her is yours to decide... though I tire of mere limbs."      Giving that time to soak in, her eyes roam back to the woman she's draped around. The Lady Arcana is oozing around Lilian- not just through what trickles from the gaping unplugged skull-bore, but she might swear from Arcana's skin directly too, and perhaps even her clothes. It seeps down Lilian's arms and legs like a steady molasses-dribble, as comfortable as it is hair-raising.      "Lady Lilian... one can become nothing but what one is. Do you not agree?" Her thumb rolls across Lilian's lower lip, as if she were trying to gently get at her teeth-- no, at her tongue.      "Take my gun and choke," Schneider murmurs at her from the cage, but she takes no heed.      "What is an arcanist, that thou art not one? Only that the world not learnen thee to bow thine head. What all the Manus must unlearn, you were never taught. The humans tried to harm you, but you have always held to your rightful place above them. I admire you, Lady Lilian. Please... stay."      She says the word with a slight pressing against the back of Lilian's head, nudging cheek-to-chest.      Then her eyes lift again, smile as smooth as ever. She gestures lazily with that horrid brain-barbed distaff at Vertin. "For, third..."      Her smile widens, soft-pitying. "You who walk the Storm so easily, and see clearest every Era. You who have stood serenely in each time and in each place..."      "... the arcanists thou hast met." Drip, drip.      "How are they?"
Ein	It was nice while it lasted, and then it was split by a sick crunch that made Druvis' one-and-a-half visibe eyes shoot wide and her shoulders to set with the slight bounce of her neck in shock wince and tension all at once. Guilty in the relief that it's not her, on realizing that it's Schneider, Druvis is unpleasantly present in this moment and trying not to be, brought to live at the table rather than gaze out the window. She tries to attend to Lilian and Arcana is there, and Forget-Me-Not as well, this surrounding and orbit and attention. Induction? Trial? "It seems 'sympathy' is thick to the air." Druvis observes, seeing Lilian failing to make eye contact and pretending not to know what she means, and disengages. Not that there's anywhere for her to go. The voyeuristic scum to Druvis, the ones that make her repeatedly swallowed down gall rise to spill out as word and acidic invective, are the humans that halo their table and the caged duelist. Rising from her seat at the contact with her outwardly-sharp cage, the bolt-fury of it leaves a woosh as she takes a full step towards the crowd of jeering humans. Like a loyal attack dog, her wand snaps into space at her side, hovering just short of reach of balled fist that knuckles into the wingtops. Forget Me Not moves as he does, she knows, and Arcana moves. . . The thick bramble of Druvis' mask faces to Arcana and even so it is like Druvis can see Arcana in the periphery of her vision clearly through a gentle curtain of leaves, always clear, pleasant-voiced to even her overworked senses. A 'close friend', one who understood, distant in the way of someone who knew more and present in the way of someone there to learn all that there was. She had been listening all night to Arcana, until Schneider gave her a breath of fresh air, and she heard the crunching, and tasted the blood of jeering Chicago on her roots and thorns. "Disgusting." She carves with a word, the cage growing even more violently outward-spiked as Druvis III bears down on the crowd of fence-sitters with all the specific fury for the people and unspecified rage she felt she had to vent in some way or else she would do something even less becoming, and rage she knew had an outlet. Glaring down mask she walks on one of the unmasked crowd and cues the human's brow backwards into a pair of grinning sludge-faced new acolytes. "Bothering with this. You find any new revelry of your comfort, rather than speaking praise for your savior. Parasite. Bug. Cease your comfortable squirming and be held, or be crushed." She threatens, finding those with bare faces a kind of rare and shiny type of bloody-handed and filthy animal. The second crunch, the second answer, causes Druvis to hunch up her shoulders and slowly release the tension, trying not to be harmed and applying all the practice in hiding her emotions utterly and still finding more leaking out. Everything was so loud, and in the fight to listen to more than the sounds of pain and the distant feeling of filthy hands touching her, there's other words. 'So just say it! What do you want from me?!' And those, at least, Druvis has an answer for. It's obvious, to her, with a dip of shoulder. "To stay." She mutters, wishing it was someone else they still had such attention for.
Lilian Rook	'Was it so inevitable?'     Despite the severity of the harm that Lilian still feels herself reeling from; despite being within the beating heart of enemy territory, surrounded on all sides, stranded without a plan; and despite the towering emotional thunderhead building and building within her, hot and smothering and rumbling unedniably even in the moments of quiet, that single question-- that single exchange from Vertin-- feels so impossibly normal that Lilian can forget about it all for just long enough to stare incredulously at the Timekeeper, and wear for her an absurd, guilty smile.     "Anything decided by people is decided what made those people, Vertin. What made them was decided by the people before them, too, and it keeps going like that; repeating backwards forever. Surely an avid intellectual like you understands that? The course of geological time creates rivers, then archeological epochs create nations from them, then historical eras create borders between, and election cycles create wars for us to die in; the only real choice was the first one ever made."     "Nothing can be different unless you change it before anyone else. And to do that, you have to get ahead of all of them in a race that's been ongoing since the dawn of history, much less the founding of Chicago." Lilian sighs, then lets her gaze drift away. The inevitable conclusion of the moment, her brief daydream of amiable normalcy, won't wait any longer. "This was inevitable because we were born in last place, Vertin. The fastest we can go is one second per second; the same as anyone else. If you want to be able to change anything, all you can do is hope that someone will let you pass, or drag down everyone who got there first."     'I know you will.'     Her awkward smile dies just as Vertin's starts.     'And whose side would that be?'     "You know perfectly well what I mean." Lilian hisses. Her limbs are made of lead and her nerves are on fire and now her head is starting to pound, but the dizziness is abating, so she meets his eyes too. "If someone believes they can gossip about her with me in private, then I've failed as a human being." She had intended to avoid drawing this line by all possible means, but tumultuous indignance on Vertin's behalf overrides the fading line of her better judgement.     "I knew at first sight that she was their designated freak. Nobody alive keeps their head exactly that low at all times without knowing the height it gets cut off down to the milimeter." Lilian says. "I think your boss knows exactly why the Foundation tolerates her as much as they do. If you think she's sold her soul to them then you're more like they are than I am like you. That's my side."     'The Manus will only ever cannibalize its own members in your pursuit of purity, just as you've done with Schneider.'     'That girl betrayed us from the very beginning.'     'You'll find an excuse wherever it's convenient.'     'The tax of gratitude that the Foundation levies has no place here.'     Lilian doesn't quite get it. More and more, as the tension rises, she has to strangle back the question that sits burning on her tongue just to keep up. "I really do wonder what you're thinking." she says, trying to cling to Vertin's pace for as long as her waning mental stamina can handle. "Trying to recruit us while one of your own is languishing in a cage right in front of us."
Lilian Rook	'... It's not actually the case that all arcanum requires spoken incantations.'     Arcana had really gotten her good. The observation that no one else made has shot Lilian's legs out from under her that, in her slowly rising panic, she has no idea how she should begin to interpret what Vertin means. "What? Socialized . . . ?" Breathing quickly, Lilian stares blankly at Vertin for another prompt. "But that's not-- What does that matter?" Her expression turns muddled, then upset, then she clings to Vertin with her eyes. "No one says 'leash your bitch' when your Watch friends turn into a building or a shadow."     'There's no competition to be had. That the wounded of the world deserve equity is something that, superficially, we all agree on. The Manus believe in praise and revenge as the vehicle for short-term relief, rather than stability and care. Concord or arcanist, there's no future to be found in such a... shaky alliance.'     That isn't what she wants to hear. Lilian herself doesn't know what it is, but she knows it has to come from Vertin before it comes from anyone else, or else nothing will be okay ever again. Her attention, already stressed, becomes breathless; ravenous. "I'm not competing! I'm-- I look down on those people! Isn't that how it should be? People who see disprivilege as fashionable and wish they had a little for themselves to explain why they're so unhappy; it is humiliating! It's humiliating for everoyne!"     'Are you spoiled, now...? But my lady, the blood hasn't even been scrubbed off of your shoes.'     Her flinch says it all. Arcana was the sucker punch. That line was the followup hook to the temple. Lilian jerks away from Forget Me Not, but pinned in as she is, she has nowhere to go by doing so. Her breathing slows, expression going blank, and she even steadies her tone, but that only makes it worse; she looks more like Vertin now that she's been caught and put on trial. Her heart rate only goes up.     "If you think Vertin has it comfortable at the Foundation, then I can't imagine what else you'd call me." Lilian says. "I didn't learn to fight so that I could do that. I learned so that I could protect people. The incendiary remarks that I made at the time were in the interests of drawing the crowd's attention; nothing more."     'Is association with yourself often debasement?'     The resistance is useless. Her poker face cracks immediately. Even though she puts it back together in an instant, all Lilian can do is regally mask the feeling of being completely cornered. "I think it's unbefitting for a successful businessman and skilled alchemist to attempt to reach someone through the subject of trauma." she says, like creaking ice. "There's nothing to gain by rummmaging around in the past for reasons to feel discontent about your present happiness." The cold sweat from her dreams finally catches up to her, beading on her neck and palms. "It's undignified."     'I see, then. Let us take a hypothetical girl instead; a friend of yours, for the sake of argument.'     Lilian's heart skips. She tastes bile in the back of her throat. To the whole room, she looks like she's been shot.     "I don't care about your convenient hypotheticals." Lilian says. Her voice comes out hoarse. "We're not having a debate. You're just using me to get Vertin to join you." Her fiercely whispered protest is far too weak to matter. "I know full well you have no use for me after she does."     'Envision this girl, turned away from every door, stared at on the streets and beaten when off of them. Her crime, her only crime, is the light within her'     "I said stop." Lilian snaps. Her energy surprises her, because the dizziness is back again. Dimly, she notices her teeth are chattering, and fears that everyone else can hear.
Lilian Rook	'for this beacon, the world hates her. She would be entitled beyond all measure to hate them in return. This is an arcanist, my lady.'     There are spots in her vision now. The timbre of her panic is completely different from when she thought the Manus intended to throw her to the wolves.     "Shut up! Just shut up! I don't care! Leave me alone!" Lilian shouts, on the breathy edge of ruinous misery, just on the other side of desperation. "You weren't there!" A second too late, she realizes that she must have blinked. Her eyes sting. She can feel the hot track down one cheek. "I told Schneider, not you!"     'I would debase myself to turn her away. You feel the same, do you not?'     Lilian twists her head this way and that to frantically scan the room for anything she can use; as if she could grab a bottle in arm's reach and smash it over her assailant's head in a confrontation of words. At the ensuing screams from Schneider, though, all she sees are the men tormenting her; and trying to drown out Forget Me Not, she screams "Is that how it is?! I'm right here and you can't take another shot?! You have so little pride you'll take it out on her and pretend it's a victory over me?! I'm ready! Come have a go! I'll skin you alive you--"     'Disgusting.'     But Lilian doesn't even get the mercy of her own fury. Druvis, the ineffable, masked stranger whose mother spoke her language, is of the same mind; something impossibly beyond her expectations. The way she flinches for Schneider's pain, too, is unnecessary; Lilian would be struck dumb and breathlessly trapped even if she didn't. All she can do is look right back at Forget Me Not, the 'bloodstains on my shoes' man, and stare him down like the barrel of a gun, knowing the trigger will be pulled and praying only that it isn't loaded.     'Heartache felt on behalf of another is a signal from fate. One girl and a set of attentive eyes exposes humanity's true face. How dearly I would like for you and Lady Druvis to talk freely.'     "There are no 'attentive eyes'! There weren't back then, and you aren't them now, because the don't exist! Aren't you too old for fairy tales?!"     Whatever compels Lilian to scream, it isn't panic any longer. If it were fear, she wouldn't dare cut the leader of Manus Vindictae with her teeth in trying to push her face past her hands. Her own tears smear together with the black oil running from her hair down to her face.     'Lady Lilian... one can become nothing but what one is. Do you not agree? What is an arcanist, that thou art not one?'     All capacity for rational argument has left her. Even irrational argument would require far more self-control than Lilian has any longer. Those words from Lady Arcana, the woman who had already seen through her so easily before, feel like a death blow. Trying to speak at all is a mistake.     'What all the Manus must unlearn, you were never taught. The humans tried to harm you, but you have always held to your rightful place above them.'     "How could anyone feel inferior to a species that can't see what's right in front of them?"
Lilian Rook	'The School for the Primary Defense of Mankind takes in young arcanist orphans from each era to raise arcane soldiers dedicated to their cause, and in attempts to devise an antibody immune to the Storm, known as Asymmetric Protein G. I am the only successful subject.'     'You who walk the Storm so easily, and see clearest every Era. You who have stood serenely in each time and in each place... The arcanists thou hast met, how are they?'     The sound of breaking bones makes her feel as if her heart has stopped completely. It becomes impossible to ignore her worst fears any longer.     §Vertin is going to get Schneider killed. She's going to lie to protect the Foundation, and once they're done exposing me and humiliating me in front of her, she's going to reject them, and then they'll kill her.§     §And Tamamo is still out there in the Storm.§     Were she in her right mind, Lilian would call it an impossibly stupid move. Nigh-on suicidal, perhaps. In her right mind, she would still infinitely prefer that her debilitated, terrified self try it all the same, rather than nothing.     Faster than blinking, faster than thinking, with such speed that it ceases to have any at all, but only a 'before' and an 'after', § Lilian is on her feet. Her sense of balance, only just recovered, barely tolerates it. § Night Mist is gone from her side. Instead, an occult Celtic pendant rests against her collarbone, in its designated place. § Winter Crowd is in her hand, pointed not at Forget Me Not right behind her, but Druvis right in front of her, aimed for the hole in her mask. § It's loaded. The sliver of visible metal indicates a full supply. § The combat-utility knife from her bag is in her hand. She has it angled towards Arcana's throat in her grip, using the incidental position from her lap as a human shield angle. § The black slime has mingled with her tears to such an extent that it reaches the bottom of her face, as if it dripped from her eyes like ruined makeup. § Her hands shake from pain instead of nerves. They bleed from countless miniscule burn wounds. The skin smokes. § And her fingerprints glow for a lingering few seconds against the tabletop. The silverwear has been bumped aside.     "So help me God I swear if you so much as twitch in a way I don't like then one or both of them die!" Lilian chokes. "Whatever you think this is, you're wrong, okay?! So don't talk to me! Don't talk about me! Don't say another word! The only thing I care about is getting my wife home safe, so unless it's about that, then you'll sit there and do nothing and say nothing as Vertin takes Schneider out of those doors, and then you'll stay that way for the next ten minutes."     She doesn't even bother with the part where she leaves. It takes all of her focus just to keep from dropping both weapons out of sheer, excruciating pain. She can barely even see through the tears. "Whatever you think you can do; no you can't. I go first, so I'm in control. Do you hear me?!"     One could almost believe she's in any real shape to deliver on that threat.
Schneider Greco	Schneider has paid little attention to the humans around her cage. Partly they're beneath her; partly the pain of several broken bones keeps her mind off such trivial things. Slumped back against the thorns, she breathes steadily, just-so keeping her composure.      "My-la-dy Druvis," she says soft-faux-serenely, at Weyerhauser's approach. "Please..."      'Please' what? Does she know what she's asking?      "Ah... I've made a mess for you, have-I not...? Mhmhm, if the jeering troubles you, just give me thicker bars so the humans can-not reach me, right?" Her half-lidded smoky eyes manage to look content, even with her wrist at a sickening angle. She could ask Druvis for more. She doesn't dare do so, here and now, by listening ears.      'Trying to recruit us while one of your own is languishing in a cage'      "Why do you not ask the worm what it has done?" purrs Arcana to Lilian.      "Mmmh. My-la-dy Rook, I was... hahhh... it seems, ne-ver one of them." Offhandedly casual, but calculated. Schneider's way through depends on no-one doing anything drastic. Like lying to Arcana, for instance. Or like--      - - - -      The Lady Arcana, of course, is put seamlessly on her feet when Lilian erupts from her chair.      "Merda, what are you thinking?! They'll kill--"      "What a beautiful arcanum, Lady Lilian. I am grateful to be in your audience. But please," the Lady Arcana says, pressing her throat through the knife to graze Lilian's ear with her lips, glrrck, "content yourself in my mercy. In your confusion, I shall-not let you come to harm."      That Druvis and Forget Me Not are being threatened concerns her no more than the 'threat' to her own life.      The strands of black that have spent the last five minutes oozing down Lilian's hair, her back, her arms and her thighs are stretched quivering-taut from Lilian to the chair behind her and the floor. In a heartbeat they clench to jerk Lilian backwards, binding her wrists and ankles to the chair and ground with nearly the same strength that broke Schneider's bones.      'I go first' can only be defeated by 'you were already doomed'.      "My apologies for causing you distress. But be at peace," she breathes as a feather-light iron-heavy command, eyes staring straight into Lilian's while re-seating herself across her lap. Arcana's fingers brush the glowing spots on the table a second later, with an idle curiosity. Her neck still oozes black.
Timekeeper	"the only real choice was the first one ever made."     "No," Vertin says immediately, if for no reason besides getting a word in before Forget Me Not does. That, in a room full of Manus Vindictae, is one of the most dangerous things Lilian could have possibly said, but Vertin tries to reel back her flash of panic. The impact of having a normal conversation on Lilian's emotional buffer is too important to ignore just for the sake of safety.     There's a particular crackle of intensity that Vertin senses coming across when her friends talk about their passions. Sonetto's melodic sincerity when reciting poetry, or Regulus's free-wheeling energy coupled with surprising care and insightfulness when framing the world through rock and roll-- hearing it now, in Lilian's bleak recitation of inevitability, makes the hairs on Vertin's neck stand up. This is the sound of hitting impenetrable bedrock, at the worst time, on the worst topic, and challenging Lilian on it would mean losing her completely.     "... The most free choice, perhaps. But I've never wished to be perfectly free, just for choices to matter at all." Her tone settles a layer darker than 'friendly normal', like late nights before deployment. "Alone, we're competing with the contrarian motion of uncountable other factors, but we're not alone in the world. Together, our aimed efforts are worth two seconds per, and if there's a gap, cumulative time can close it." "I knew at first sight that she was their designated freak."     Forget Me Not frowns, lips tightening. He draws back a bit, straightening up. "Then you and she should already know that the Foundation is a failed project. Only a bureaucracy with mankind's arrogance at its heart would need such a sacrificial lamb."     Not ten feet away, Schneider's ragged breaths are drowned out by the drunken humans swarming around her cage. "No one says 'leash your bitch' when your Watch friends turn into a building or a shadow."     "No," Vertin's hat hides her eyes when she ducks her face, but the apology in her tone is audible enough. "They don't. All I mean to say is that I'm glad you're with me." "I'm not competing! I'm-- I look down on those people!"     Vertin's intensity in meeting Lilian's gaze flickers, twitching away awkwardly before returning. "... I pity them, I suppose. It isn't a dignified way to search for satisfaction in a cruel world. I just don't see any such people here." "I think it's unbefitting for a successful businessman and skilled alchemist to attempt to reach someone through the subject of trauma."     "If not for humanity, we would be druid, alchemist, diviner, goddess. Instead, we are 'arcanist'." Forget Me Not looks down at Lilian from the corner of his eyes, where her tremble makes Arcana's shed fluid roll down her neck and back, over the exposed tattoo. "My sincerest apologies for the indignity."
Timekeeper	"Shut up! Just shut up!"     "Lilian?!" The escalation to tears and shouting feels sudden, and Vertin is lost in the context. The impulse to launches her halfway to her feet, but lurching uneasily, looking between her and Forget Me Not. "What was it you told Schneider...?"     Somehow, it doesn't seem to help Vertin's impression at all that Forget Me Not actually *does* back off at Lilian's begging. Still with that same faint smile on his head, he withdraws from the closest circle of conversation, steepling his fingers at his waist, but not before offering her a blue-black handkerchief.     "My lady, it pains me to see your wounds still so fresh. I won't torment you with them any longer, but please, spare a thought to the nature of my Walden." "Hast that abominable worm misled you, Lady Vertin?"     This time when Schneider's bones crack, Vertin is rigidly unresponsive besides a shiver that runs from her jaw down to her fingertips. The one eye visible under the brim of her hat bores into Arcana, then flinches away, ashamed rather than defiant. It finds Druvis, Vertin's face half-hidden and Druvis's half-exposed, and watches her steadily as she turns away from the table in disgust.     It seems overly optimistic to put faith in Arcana's promise to spare Schneider from more torture no matter what she says. She can't even be certain whether Arcana herself believes that the Foundation created the Storm, and neither Vertin's confusion or her muddy best guesses have sufficed as answers. But if Arcana really wanted nothing besides to kill them all and didn't care for their responses, there was nothing anyone could do to stop her, so Vertin blindly trudges forward regardless. "Disgusting."     Some of the human orbiters scatter at Druvis's approach, others still stay, grinning teeth beneath interlocked black hands, leaning up against the bars of thorns as if daring her. The unmasked among them are less secure in their position, but remain men among arcanists, and the milling human tide orients around them as a comfortable replacement for the Walden's stage.     "Hey, doll, c'mon. We're all just havin' a laugh here, what's the problem? The bitch's out of the club."     "Sifting out the uppity broads, that's what Mr. Me-Not said! Hahaha!"     "Hey, maybe in the next life, us chosen're gonna get one each for ourselves!"     "Why not two? Ha!"     "How 'bout you, darling? Wearing those jewels, whose eyes are you trying to pull? Or is it an open offer?"     "Stop. That's enough out of you!" Forget Me Not shoots to his feet, as snarlingly angry as he's ever been seen. "Fetch a mask and put it onto him. Either his heart will be cleared, or broken. No unworthy will survive the sifting with us."     He points, and the masked men that were just moments before snickering at the banter hurry off of their chairs and disappear into the shadows of the bar. They return quickly, carrying a fresh mask, while others grip the cat-caller's arms and legs to hold him down on the floor. Through his thrashing fear, they force it onto his face, and thrashing turns to black spattered convulsions. His brief stillness is wracked by seizure and deep, pained whines, before he erupts into a hunched figure with inhuman proportions made entirely of Arcana's slime.     It turns immediately on those who followed Forget Me Not's orders, and he pays them no mind anymore. The cage is impenetrable, and no loyal slave of the Manus would dare charge the table that their mistress sits at. The only reason for Druvis to bother interfering at all would be to save those humans-- and the others, outside claw's reach, are laughing like a fever dream.
Timekeeper	It's intoxicating, like the delirium of a poison carving its way towards Vertin's heart. The horrified 'stop!' that she means to shout doesn't make it past her throat; Schneider, in the cage with her arm bent just like that one human mocked, is in sharper relief in her vision than the black tar monster she's helpless to do anything about. At least one human dies, Vertin can't muster a word, the jazz and laughter and sounds of meat blur together. "... the arcanists thou hast met. How are they?" "So don't talk to me! Don't talk about me! Don't say another word!"     It's over again before Vertin even has time to react. Without the synesthetic shifting of teleportation to warn her, Lilian's instantaneous threat is as surprising to Vertin as to anyone, and Arcana's pre-seeded rebuttal the same. When Lilian is reeled back into her seat, Vertin does the same, slowly easing back down into her chair with her fingers digging into the armrests, when she'd leapt up to try and assist whatever plan Lilian had. Past Arcana's head, the image of Lilian's oil-and-tear-stained face is seared into her vision.     ". . ."     But Forget Me Not gets to her first. With Lilian's wrists bound, he hastens over to pluck his handkerchief back and dab at her forehead to keep the black fluid from dripping into her eyes, no angrier than he was before.     "Those wounds... please, you are in no danger with us. Would a drink help calm your nerves?"     If Vertin lied to Arcana now, it would be the least convincing lie ever spoken. In silence, the brim of her hat shadows both of her eyes, expression unreadable. Her shoulders rise and fall in an exhausted sigh.     When she eventually speaks, the simple phrase falls heavily from her lips. ". . . I rarely meet them."     To Druvis next, Forget Me Not fusses over her, after the incidents of man, monster, and then held at gunpoint. "Lady Druvis, are you unhurt? Is there anything I could fetch for you to relax?"     "Most are abandoned in asylums, correctional facilities, orphanages, or slums. Those that remain keep their heads low and their mouths shut. Entire eras may pass without meeting any. They are dying off."     Another labored pause. When Bellwhistle comes to mind again, it's the chip in her arm left by the nameless and faceless who clipped her in a driveby for no reason. Her eyes fall on the vivid burns on Lilian's knuckles.     She sighs, and the bloody cage, without any new sounds of bone crunching, only drifts her attention for a moment, before she looks straight-on at Arcana for the first time since the beginning of the questions.     ". . . I accept. I will join Manus Vindictae."
Lilian Rook	The moments that precede and follow are something that Lilian loses all grasp of in the moments around her last-ditch decision. Their linear relation is like an annoying buzz in her ear.                 ----------     'No'     Vertin's sudden certainty catches Lilian off-guard. The change is enough to snatch a few more moments from the iron grip of inevitability.     'Alone, we're competing with the contrarian motion of uncountable other factors, but we're not alone in the world. Together, our aimed efforts are worth two seconds per, and if there's a gap, cumulative time can close it.'     "The two of us, and how many of them, Vertin?" says Lilian. Somehow, it's her smile that looks heartbroken.                 ----------     'Why do you not ask the worm what it has done?'     She wants to. Lilian wants to know the answer to that question so badly it makes her feel insane. Whatever Schneider did to upset Manus Vindictae has nothing to do with anything, especially not 'getting out of their current situation', and still, even consciously knowing that, Lilian stops to think about it for a fraction of a second.     What she says is "I can always ask later.     What she means is that the answer can only be disinteresting or give Arcana the upper hand; and she knows it; and she can't do anything about it.                 ----------     'Then you and she should already know that the Foundation is a failed project.'     "I don't know anything about the Foundation." Lilian snaps back. "I don't work for them. All I know is that they don't answer questions despite asking me a thousand of them, and half of them don't like me much either."                 ----------     'Mmmh. My-la-dy Rook, I was... hahhh... it seems, ne-ver one of them.'     "Schneider please." Lilian hisses more fearfully than she had at Vertin before. She doesn't dare turn to look. She wants to accuse her of giving up and dragging them all down because her sister was all that mattered. She wants to blame her for trying to jump the fence and run with Vertin at the worst possible time. She wants to yell at her for giving her anything at all to care about outside herself right now.     "'Thou art responsible to thy blood first above all else, both the blood of thy line, and the blood shed for thee.' That's the very first of the Codes." She forces herself to breathe out, then back in again, trembling. "And that's the only thing I need to know right now."     'They don't. All I mean to say is that I'm glad you're with me.'     "If I hadn't lied to you, you'd have stayed away. I'm sorry."                 ----------     'If not for humanity, we would be druid, alchemist, diviner, goddess. Instead, we are 'arcanist'.'     Somehow, at that penultimate moment, the only thing Lilian can seize on is where she is being listed in the group. The subtle inclusion feels like staring at the sun. She mutters "I'm not a diviner." before having to shallowly catch her breath. "Not by trade. It's not like that. It's--" Following his gaze, she tries to turn herself to make her back even slightly less visible. "It's not a gift you can talk about. They don't have a name for people like me anyways."                 ----------     'Lilian?!'     "I said shut up!" If she were going to yell that, it'd have been better if she were simply too frantic to tell friend from foe any longer. Anything would be better than the hot tears and ragged sounds that are summoned by her own friend. "You don't know anything! So don't make me!"                 ----------
Lilian Rook	'They'll kill--'     Lilian, her back to Schneider, her eyes wild, gun trained on Druvis, knife hand shaking against Arcana's throat, spits out a thought condensed to the point of unintelligibility with the confidence that it is a convincing answer. Sakura's words bring to mind Sakura's face, which gives her just enough certainty to truncate the start and end into just the word "Bloom." until it sounds like 'try it'.     But the fact that Manus Vindictae won't kill her is the problem. When tested to her instinctive core what she believed they would do, Lilian gambled all-in on wresting away control for an instant and letting someone else slip up in the heat of the moment. Their patience was something she failed to consider. Vertin might have. Lilian is left to gaze in mute horror at Arcana pressing herself to the blade instead, feeling the familiar ice cold lightning run up her spine too late.     'What a beautiful arcanum, Lady Lilian.'     "How--"     The knife hits the floor before Lilian can say another word. Winter Crow slips from the fingertips that still clutch to its sides only a second after her body hits the chair. The realization that Arcana could have done this to her at any time arrives after three more. Pulling with her arms, twisting her wrists, clawing what little she can reach with her fingernails, Lilian struggles to the point of hyperventilation before it really sinks in.     For those four seconds, all she can think about is the raw animal flight reflex which commands her to escape with the last dregs of her strength. Wordless, frantic, seeing and hearing nothing at all, she tries and fails to break free, then to bend the chair frame, then to at least knock herself over, and achieves nothing. Then her vision blacks out for a split second, her head rolls forward, and the cold and weighty realization that there are no more plans to think up anyways settles on her chest like an iron brick.     The feeling of being doomed to something and unable to do anything about it is so impossibly alien to her that it inspires horrified fascination. Even if part of her keeps examining and reexamining the scenario over and over again, looking for anything she can use, the greater part that knows this was never in her hands sees no reason to keep elevating her pulse like this, and sickeningly slams the brakes on her runaway panic all at once. Once it does, neither the terrified thrashing of the Manus' human victim nor the sounds of the gruesome spectacle unfolding behind her can change it again. The suffering of strangers is invisibly small beside the totality of her powerless fear.     Even as it happens, or perhaps because of it, Arcana returning to her lap is practically a comfort by then. It was the position she'd taken when everything was fine; a relative judgement that Lilian knows is utterly insane. When she realizes a moment later that the thread she hangs from is so thin that the idea of being left alone like this feels worse in her mind than anything else she can think of, and then suffers the intrusive thought of picturing Tamamo in Arcana's place, Lilian tenses up all her core muscles and lets slip a bleak, dizzy little laugh; then a delirious, hiccuping half-sob. Her dangling pendant bounces lightly against her collarbone.     'My apologies for causing you distress. But be at peace.'     Her fists might ball up behind the back of the chair, but Lilian doesn't even try to argue. When Lilian lifts her face again, stained with rivulets of runny black tear-mixed oil, most of what bleeds into her voice is an emotion she pretends not to notice. One that dredges from the spent depths of her heart, in numbing comprehension, "You mean it. Don't you.", and the bitterest tears it contains. She hates the overwhelming shudder of catharsis that follows.
Lilian Rook	'My lady, it pains me to see your wounds still so fresh.'     'What was it you told Schneider...?'     Forget Me Not's words trickle back to her just before Vertin's, both seconds before the world had turned red and a naked blade had found its way to her hand. Though she averts her gaze, breathing like a cornered animal, resignation makes her choked-up voice sound halfway calm.     "I told her about a little girl named Holly." Lilian says. "And imagined a world where one person helped her."     'please, spare a thought to the nature of my Walden.'     Lilian swallows so hard that it hurts. It makes her blurry vision and stinging eyes worse, not better. It's suddenly too easy to imagine. When all she has to compare it to is stealing from her mother's company labs after hours, the knife twists on its own.     'Those wounds... please, you are in no danger with us. Would a drink help calm your nerves?'     Lilian can do nothing to prevent Forget Me Not from approaching her, nor fussing over her condition, nor saying whatever he likes. The momentum of playing the cornered animal had kept him at arm's length for a short while, but that desperate ferocity cannot exist in a world where she had already pulled the trigger, been met with the least of all consequences for it, forgiven, and then reassured. It oozes from every little thing about her that she has no idea how to deal with what's happening; how to process someone wiping the tears away instead of shouting at her to snap out of it.     It allows him to seamlessly slot into the role of a servant. That dangerous position of privilege near Lilian allows her in turn to slide into the mien of a noblewoman reeling from a broken engagement. She lifts her chin to watch an indefinite point across the table, flinching less from Manus Vindictae than her own friend giving her a hug. "I did it to myself." she says, in the tone of an immiserated 'I know'. "My coordination was off. God made rules against what I do."     '. . . I rarely meet them.'     If she had the energy still in her to be shocked, Lilian would be. Instead, her eyes sluggishly rise to meet Vertin's, and the look she wears is 'hurt', 'sympathetic', 'pained', and perhaps 'betrayed' instead.     'Most are abandoned in asylums, correctional facilities, orphanages, or slums. Those that remain keep their heads low and their mouths shut. Entire eras may pass without meeting any. They are dying off.'     Lilian thinks of Bellwhistle too. She doesn't seem to comprehend Vertin's gaze wandering to her hands, but she curls her fingers defensively all the same. "Was that what I was supposed to learn in Chicago?" she says. The teary hoarseness in her throat makes it a dry whisper. "Why didn't you say anything?" Lilian subvocalizes a cough, and stubbornly raises her voice in spite of it. "I went looking all over. I even rented a room to stay the night. I really thought if I could just keep grinning and bearing it a little longer, there'd be someone at the end of it."     Lilian's voice suddenly sounds so very small. Her words are shaky and fragile that she feels ashamed of the childish hurt she feels in them. "Why did you let me keep living in that fantasy land, Vertin? What did you think I'd do?"     '. . . I accept. I will join Manus Vindictae.'     For the first time ever, Lilian hadn't believed at all that she would be the last person standing. She had thought it from the moment she woke up; that she could only be the weak link who would drag the others down. Vertin giving up first overwhelms her with relief so sickeningly intense that it elicits breathless laughter and a bleary sad half-smile.     ". . . Thank you. A drink would be lovely." Lilian murmurs to Forget Me Not. Free to fully subsume his role as that of 'the staff' supporting her, she says "Please. If we're going to keep talking, make it very, very strong."