Possible methods of completion: acquire individually, request 
assistance from aircrew 


Additional opportunities: poison Grand Adviser (inadvisable, may 
cause the loss of a critical resource re mission: acquire covert 
information, personal satisfaction deemed a low priority) 


Expected results: momentary termination of complaints, cover 
maintained. 


Verdict: comply 
"Yes, Lordship." 


"And a biscuit of some sorts. | can't imagine they have anything 
worthwhile on this flying bathtub, but we must endure." 


Objective: painful liquidation of Sakarn Var Surten, insufferable twit 
Operator: Self 


Possible methods of completion: strangulation, use of concealed 
weapon (blade), excessive physical force (hand to hand) 


Additional opportunities: none 


Expected results: failure in primary mission (acquire covert 
information), expulsion, eventual death, immense sense of self- 
satisfaction 


Verdict: postpone verdict until completion of primary mission 
"Yes, Lordship." 
The Scientist 


Trighit sat hunched over in his seat, studying the tiny creatures 
scurrying over the assorted dishes he had placed on the tray in front 
of him. As they ran across, the plates and cups changed colors 


constantly, creating a sea of fluctuating rainbow. He chuckled as he 
wrote down the results in his notebook. 


"To think they almost didn’t let me take them aboard,” he murmured. 
His gaze shifted to the passing flight attendant, who glared at him. 


"Of course, it helped that they didn’t exactly know about them | 
suppose.” 


He shuddered, thinking of all the specimens in the lower cabin, 
alone and unprotected. It just tore him up when they took away the 
flasgows. 


"Bah, 'danger to passengers.’ What hogwash!" 


He shook himself back to reality. This was no way to begin the 
journey! There were going to be dozens of subjects to study at the 
destination. Trighit refocused on the creatures in front of him as 
waves of color broke through the formerly transparent glass. 


Best of all, he wouldn't be completely surrounded by the pompous 
upper castes, with their "Look at that cute Courtail, aww, look, he 
thinks he's smart!". Sure, he'd have to put up with Sakarn's belittling 
comments and arrogant attitude, but at least he wasn't the only one 
this time. 


He grinned to himself, glancing in his superior's direction. He was 
quite out of his element here, wasn't he? 


"Uhhh, Trighit? They're, um... doing a thing." 
He turned to look back at his compatriot in the seat next to him. 
"What?" he asked curiously. 


Pokum pointed a fat finger at the tray in front of Trighit. The 
creatures had begun devouring the various glassware, as well as 
noticeably increasing in size. Trighit gasped in delight as he pulled 
out his notebook and ferociously jotted down notes and speculations 
about this change in behavior. 


As the plane sped on, Trighit became more and more lost in his 
notes and fantasies about what creatures were waiting for him at the 
end of the ride. 


The Assistant 


Trighit was muttering again. He always muttered when he was doing 
science, or whatever he called it. In his opinion, what Trighit did 
always took all of the fun out of anything. It wasn't enough that 
flaquets made colors on glass, apparently. It needed analstisis, or 
something. Whatever it was, it was exceedingly boring. Pokum 
sighed, turned his gaze towards the window, and asked himself the 
same question he pondered over day after day. 


Why do | do it? 


Of course, he already knew the answer. Or answers, rather, as there 
were many of them, though none felt quite... complete. It might have 
been because deep down, he really did think all this science was 
cool. Or at least the things the animals did were cool. The note 
taking and repetitiveness could never be interesting to him. 


Maybe it was because he had nothing better to do. Everyone else 
back at home was pretty depressing, with the most interesting 
conversations consisting of who had been harassed the worst that 
day, or how long people thought it would take for the Empress to 
actually do something to help them. At least Trighit was energetic 
and somewhat fun to be around. 


But the answer that nearly always came up in his mind with finality 
was that he cared about the bugger. Trighit always had a... well, a 
bad reputation, to say the least. No one respected him and, in 
Pokum's opinion, no one ever would. None of the Black Court could 
understand him, and all of the upper castes laughed at him for trying 
to reach outside of his realm. Pokum was the only one that actively 
supported him. 


Well, as active as one can be while trying not to be seen with him in 
public. 


A loud crunching noise drew Pokum's attention back to the tray in 


front of Trighit's seat. The creatures had begun eating the dishes, 
and Trighit looked lost in thought, with closed eyes and whispers 
aimed at the ceiling. He poked his friend. 


"Uhhh, Trighit? They're, um... doing a thing." 
The scientist snapped back to attention, looking intensely at Pokum. 
"What?" 


In response, he quickly pointed at the flaquets. Trighit squealed and 
rapidly began scribbling in his notebook again. Pokum sighed again. 
Any sliver of hope that the trip might make his friend more normal, or 
at least go smoothly was shattered when he tried to bring a dozen 
animals on the plane with them, then argued with the employee for 
an hour. They only managed to pry him away from the cages when 
someone brought Trighit some sort of book full of weird Earth 
animals. Pokum himself had only stopped the constant exclamations 
and speculations about the illustrated creatures when he pulled out 
the specimens he had snuck aboard in his coat for when he was 
sick of Trighit yelling in his ear. 


He never had high hopes for the researcher's capacity for containing 
his excitement, but he at least dreamed it could last more than ten 
minutes. He groaned as he reclined in his seat and closed his eyes. 
It was gonna be a long trip. 


The Artists 


Tyhja shifted idly on his seat, throwing shadows onto the 
surrounding walls. He longed to be out of this pressurized tube, 
longed to see the sky again. Would there be more flying things 
where they landed, he wondered. Birds, perhaps. He liked birds. He 
glanced at his sister, seated across from him. “What do you hear, 
sister?” 


Clear Evening glanced up from her notebook scribblings, startled. 
“Brother?” 


“You tilt your head slightly when you're listening,” Tyhja stated 
simply. 


Clear Evening blinked. She never realized this about herself, but 
then her brother knew her well, knew her mannerisms well. While 
she needed to write down her observations of the world, he simply 
remembered them. 


“The sound of the plane, | suppose.” She looked back at her 
notebook. The exterior was identical to that of her brother’s 
notebook, the interior completely different. Her words were neatly 
and orderly arranged, sometimes verses were grouped in the 
corners—Tyhja’s drawings were scattered all over the pages, 
without regard for time or place. How different they were, indeed. 


Tyhja sighed as he watched his sister drift back into her writing. He 
missed home. He really didn’t have much business being here, he 
really didn’t feel too comfortable in the presence of that Mender, and 
especially that Watcher. But his sister was here, and truth be told, 
he didn’t mind overmuch being able to see new things to sketch. 
Tyhja looked at the notebook on his lap. Opening it, he flipped 
through his drawings, letting the well-worn feel of the pages comfort 
him somewhat. 


A series of ice crystals growing, some crystalline, some jagged. A 
diagram of his hand. A distant landscape. A crystal vase. A rough 
sketch of the outside of the plane he and his sister now sat on. 


Tyhja looked out the window. Gold-rimmed clouds in shapes he’d 
rarely seen blanketed the sky around the plane, and though he still 
longed for home, he could not help but marvel at them. 


The Highest 


Lucrezen Lhivaen Battackan Chlolassouvin sat with one set of 
hands folded in her lap, the second folded across her chest, and the 
last holding a Styrofoam cup filled with coffee, tiny in her slender, 
oversized fingers. A strange beverage, though that went without 
saying: everything was strange now, and that itself was strange. 
Lucrezen was not used to strange. 


It was rather refreshing. 


The plane for example. Sparse, simple, utilitarian, pedestrian. 


Nothing like the airships Lucrezen was familiar with, with their 
delicately sculpted interiors and illuminated scrollwork declaring the 
majesty of empresses past. Air travel was all about spectacle: you 
had conquered gravity. Trains were for actually getting somewhere 
fast. 


She observed the others around her. Dregs of the Institute, each 
and every one of them: the unwanted, unliked, and unneeded. Did 
they realize it? Some, probably. The Black Courtsman scientist, the 
Mender, they knew, though she was sure the latter would refuse to 
admit it. The servant, possibly, along with the poet and artist. The 
assistant, no. The girl, not at all. They kept their distance from her, 
trying not to look, a lifetime of conditioning fighting against the 
novelty of a Watcher in the same room as them. 


Lucrezen sipped her coffee, and thought of the last time things had 
been strange, when she had stepped off that train with the wind 
whipping dust in her face and the townsfolk staring with gaping jaws. 
This was another grand adventure. She rather liked that. 


We, the Throne of Her Royal and Illuminated Highness, The Lady of 
Lands, Queen of Queens, Empress Utmai Cjen, Sixth of Her Name 
and Fourteenth of Her Line, do hereby approve the exchange of 
scholars between the Imperial Institute of Paranormal and Esoteric 
Study and the Foundation, so as to foster the sharing of knowledge 
and greater companionship between the Realm of the Empire and 
the Lands of the Uncharted North. So We approve the articles 
proposed and attached, and deliver Our blessing upon this venture. 


We seal this in the Imperial Name, this Tenth of Radeyt, in this Year 
Four-Hundred and Eighty-Seven of the Third Imperial Age. 


« Hub » 


Turn a New Page 


Alai swiped her card again. The door remained closed. She frowned, 
biting her lip, and swiped the card again. Still nothing. 


To the outside observer, Alai would have looked like a befuddled 
tropical fish that had somehow managed to swim hundred of miles 
inland just to land in the middle of a cement hallway. Her complexly- 
layered clothing was bright red, yellow, and blue, contrasting with 
her dark skin. Her hair was done up in a series of small spiral buns. 
All let out, it would go down past her waist. With her free arm she 
held a stack of books: a fresh notebook, an English-Imperial 
dictionary, the Guided Meditations of the Empress, the Foundation 
Standard Operations Handbook, a map of Site-19, a folder with her 
department briefings, a book from home. 


She looked to her right, and then to her left. There was nobody 
there. She looked at the clock on the wall, converting the time in her 
head. The day-night cycles here, along with the jet-lag, had made 
the last two days a complete blur, but she was beginning to bounce 
back. 


Six-and one-half hours from the cycle origin, that’s equivalent to... 


Was she too early? Would they think badly of her for it? Maybe she 
should go back to the dormitory and... 


No, no, that wouldn’t do. Had to show proper work ethic. Show up 
bright and early, make a good impression. Couldn’t be seen as a 
burden. 


She swiped the card again. Nothing happened, again. Look right, 
look left, still no one. The hallway was bare, hauntingly lonely. None 
of the portraits or statues or tapestries of empresses and sundry 
figures past and their accomplishments. 


Seeing no better option, Alai knocked, as loud as she could with one 


hand. This persisted for some time, with the occasional “Hello?” 
thrown in for good measure. 


She was just about to give up before the door slid open, revealing a 
sleepy-looking man of early middle-age. Brown hair, light skin, rather 
tall, bags under his eyes, broad, boxy build, a bit of a gut anda 
general look of dishevelment. 


“You the one from Antarctica?” He said, his voice tinged with 
tiredness. 


Alai nodded, smiling. There was that word again, their name for the 
Empire. 


“Alai LoCaen sen’a LoCaen Jaie, journeyman-scholar of the fifth 
school, Imperial Institute of Paranormal and Esoteric Study.” She 
spoke as clearly as she could, trying to minimize her accent, use 
Northworld inflections. It didn’t help much. Her accent spread across 
her words like blackbutter on bread. 


“Card wasn’t working?” 
“No, it wasn’t letting me in.” 
“You put it in upside down or something?” 


Alai looked at the card. She didn’t think that she had...oh, there it 
was. A little black arrow next to the magnetic strip, pointing the way 
it should have been swiped. 


Heat flushed through her face. Of course. Of course she’d make a 
silly mistake like that on the first day. 


“Come on, might as well show you around.” The man yawned. “You 
one of those crazy gung-ho morning people?” 


“| don’t think so. It’s all very strange, the timing of everything.” 
“Guess it would be for you. Name’s Ed, by the way.” 


Ed. No family name? Or was he withholding it? Low-caste? His 
appearance was slovenly, so that was a possibility or...no, couldn’t 


keep thinking in Imperial terms. 


Alai followed Ed through a set of monolithic plastic frames with no 
doors. Some sort of security system? 


“You’re a few hours early for the morning shift, so | guess | can give 
you the tour.” Ed lazily swung a hand out across the expanse of the 
room. “Welcome to the library.” 


It was both reassuringly familiar and uncomfortably different. Plain 
grey carpet on the floor, no ornamentation or design. Rows and 
rows of bookshelves, metal instead of wood. Kiosks for computers 
far smaller than she was used to, tables and chairs scattered 
throughout. The same long, pale lights instead of hanging paper 
lamps. The overall lack of decoration gave it that same sort of cold, 
empty, alien feel. There was no one else there. 


“Main desk is up here on level one, and then you've got level two 
below us, and then three and four and all the way down to six. 
Levels four through six are anomalous materials: you won’t be down 
there. You just stick around here and get books when people need 
help getting books, do your own research, whatever. Your shift 
doesn't start for another hour and a half so look around, | guess.” He 
yawned again. “I'll be over there, wake me up if you need me. Try 
not to need me.” 


Without another glance in her direction, he trundled over to the main 
desk and sat in the chair, leaning back with his feet on the desk. 


Alai stood there for a moment, 

She walked over to the desk. 

“Um, excuse me, but what am | supposed to do?” 
Ed opened one eye. 


“You read the paperwork? Until Dr. Quail gets here for the day shift, 
you can do whatever the hell you want. I’m not your boss.” 


“Oh. Okay. If you could show me to...” 


Ed grunted, in that universal ‘I am trying to sleep do not disturb the 
grump’ way. No getting anything from him, then. 


Alai hesitantly wandered over to one of the desks and set her books 
down. The stillness was all-encompassing, muffling even her own 
heartbeat. Ed’s behavior puzzled her, threw everything off balance. 
She wasn’t sure if he was a superior, or a co-worker, and his total 
lack of interest, in her home, in the exchange program was bizarre. 


Couldn’t dwell on it now. He wasn’t going to help, so she’d have to 
make her own. Alai took her dictionary from her pile and stepped 
into the shelves.