The exercise:
Write about: progress.
Max has officially chosen Midnight as his fish's name. I approve, for the record. Of both names. And I want full credit for not interfering with the naming process.
Back to work in the Osoyoos tomorrow. The countdown is definitely on now.
3 comments:
Well done on not interfering with the naming of the fish! What would you have called the fish then, out of curiosity?
Progress
Fabian's efforts to stay out of the onset of trouble reached near Herculean levels and he found himself obsessively checking his watch the next morning as though reaching 24 hours without drama was a magic milestone of some kind. He was quite relieved when he got an email half-way through the morning from Dread inviting him to lunch at Admiralty House. The email included a PS to dress nicely and Fabian, who had mostly relied on his wife before things reached the divorce stage to tell him what was nice and what wasn't looked at himself in the mirror in the public toilets on the sixth floor of the Museum and decided that he had no clue what Dread meant. He was wearing a dark-blue polo shirt and beige slacks and he'd found a yellowish houndstooth blazer hanging on a coatstand in his office. He didn't remember it, but it seemed to fit so he assumed it was either his, or was on some kind of permanent loan to him. His shoes, which he couldn't see as the mirror showed him from his rib-cage upwards only, were mud-splashed and scuffed and the soles were wearing thin, but it wasn't like he had any others in his office to wear. He had checked under the chairs just in case, like the jacket, there would be some mysterious footwear desirous of being worn but had found none.
"What are you wearing?" said Dread, almost predictably, when they met in the garden in front of Admiralty House. The building was part office and part accommodation block for high-ranking officers of the Imperial Navy. As an Admiral Dread wasn't technically high-ranking enough but being a Mage gave him, he said, about four extra points in the ranking system the Navy used and that put him comfortably in range, and so he had a suite of four rooms in the building. The garden in the front was large and spacious and had been a parade ground in the days of the old regime. Now it was planted with young trees and evergreen shrubs and flower beds here and there created geometric patterns for the officers with rooms high-up in the building to admire. Bees buzzed about, making Fabian feel slightly uneasy.
"Clothes?" Fabian wondered if the jacket had been a mistake after all.
"Didn't Celine make you throw that jacket away?"
Fabian's memory surged open and a smile of relief blossomed across his face. "So that's what it was doing in the office! I hid it from her!"
"But why? It's hideous. I told you that when you were thinking about buying it."
"You did," said Fabian, the memories unfolding like poorly-made origami. He patted the pockets and found a bulge in an inside one. "So I bought it to annoy her so she'd never think to look for it... yes, I put the rust-elf figurines in here." He started to draw the box containing them out, then thought better of it and let them sit in their pocket.
"Good plan," said Dread after a moment. "It would have been a shame to have them caught up in the divorce. But did you have to wear it here?"
Fabian shrugged his way out of the jacket. "Well, I can't let it out of my sight now," he said, "not until I move the figurines. But is it so ba--"
"Yes."
The restaurant in Admiralty House was on the ground floor through a high-ceilinged, tiled, echoing corridor and the room was barely a quarter-full as they were seated. Dread nodded around them: "It gets busier in an hour or so, but I thought it might be nice to be able to hear ourselves talk as well."
"What's this about then?" Fabian had been hoping that it was an opportunity to have lunch with a friend rather than having an ulterior motive involved.
"Progress," said Dread picking up the menu and frowning at it. "The soups here are terrible, don't order one. The Assessors were going through a bunch of old records and I was going through them after them to see if there was anything of actual interest in there. Most of them were pretty dull, but there was one that was surprisingly missing a page."
"Oh?" Fabian looked up from the meat mains, all of which were tempting him significantly.
"Yes. Which I ordinarily would have ignored but after your... experience with them, I was curious. All our paper records are digitised of course, so I pulled up the relevant one. And would you believe it, but it was a brief reference to the Staff of Five Elements."
Fabian dropped his menu on the floor and had to retrieve it before a waiter could dart across and replace it. Even so the waiter removed the potentially dirtied menu from his hands and gave him a new one, and he smiled as graciously as he could manage.
"What?"
"The Assessors don't have access to Navy records under normal circumstances," said Dread, seemingly engrossed in the list of pasta offerings. "Which probably why they wanted to search the paper records. Oh, did you mean the staff?" He looked up innocently and Fabian almost swatted him with the menu. "Well, it seems that the Navy provided ships and ground-support for an expedition to retrieve a Heart of an Umber Hulk, which your Maestro was on--"
"Ha!" said Fabian.
"-- and that the Heart was used to fashion a Staff of Five Elements, which was then used in a ceremony a few weeks before the Day of No Sun to be the only way of entering or exiting the Halls of Sunset."
Greg - honestly, I don't know. The names chosen were the first thought of by the boys, though Max had several other options that he was considering, all of which I liked less than Midnight.
Hmm, another thing gone missing after an inspection. I feel like things are, indeed, beginning to progress in Fabian's investigation. Or whatever he would prefer to call whatever it is he's doing.
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