#greybor

“About time,” Daeran proclaims from where he’s perched on what appears to be a crate of root vegetables in one of the citadel’s subterranean store rooms, this one in charge of supplying the kitchens. “What took so long?” The other denizens of the store room include one assassin, one succubus, and one Hellknight, also perched on various repurposed surfaces, except for the Hellknight who stands with his back to them, hands clasped behind him, and is apparently admiring logistics’ way of keeping track of supplies by pinning various dire messages to a notice board on the wall. Such as “LOW ON PEAS,” in all capitals, which Lem can read from as far as the storeroom’s entrance Seelah convoys her through. “Seelah. Commander,” Greybor greets them, with a quick glance diverted from stuffing his pipe. “Shut the door behind you.” “Is there a supply crisis of some sort?” Lem tries, and points her chin at the notice board. As soon as she was able to walk after tripping over Areelu’s lexical paradoxing—which outfitted her with a curse, judging by Ember’s witchy fix—Seelah mercilessly dragged her all the way down to the citadel’s basement with a “later, just hurry.” So here the two of them stand in the doorway, later or some such, amidst root vegetables and a dire deficit of peas. “My dearest muse, is this some kind of new dramatic fashion?” Daeran asks instead of answering, and cants his head to scrutinize her face. “What is that? Paint?” He cants his head the other way and squints, then his brows angle into a frown. “Were you crying blood?” Trouble takes this as his cue to give “LOW ON PEAS” his back and examine the other dire situation. His expression promptly monumentalizes to its granite aspect as he assays her. If he has a tell, it’s that he doesn’t have one, except where his eyes tighten a little, but other than that he evinces no evident alarm whatsoever. “Are you functional, Knight-Commander?” he queries in his dry workaday tone. Define functional, she doesn’t say, but since now is probably not the time to consider which specific functions he’s holding in mind, she shrugs. “I appear to be functioning as intended, yes,” she offers, then adds, just in case it needs disambiguating, “whatever that was. Why are we communing with root vegetables?”