When shipping is your 9 to 5 job (working for Venus here!), sometimes you just want to take a break and have a nice emotional family drama instead of another dime a dozen sex/flirt thing.
When shipping is your 9 to 5 job (working for Venus here!), sometimes you just want to take a break and have a nice emotional family drama instead of another dime a dozen sex/flirt thing.
But isn't emotional famliy drama also Grace's day job?
Seriously though I feel that Teresu Hari is probably still having to adjust to arcane fate/ the fact that her family does't know her anymore.
As she:
Something I been thinking about, its important to remember that Lunars are not automatically friends to solar exlated. It be a mistake to assume that the Lunar that pressured the party to keep going didn't damn well know what the goldie sidereal was saying. If the entire party died but still managed to blow up the city? Could have still been a win by their priorities. But its kinda hard to get a read on them as of right now.
Something I been thinking about, its important to remember that Lunars are not automatically friends to solar exlated. It be a mistake to assume that the Lunar that pressured the party to keep going didn't damn well know what the goldie sidereal was saying. If the entire party died but still managed to blow up the city? Could have still been a win by their priorities. But its kinda hard to get a read on them as of right now.
Flotsam had to make her promise she would skip town if they didn't make the next meet up. The lunar and Flotsam were lovers and it seems more likely she was just paranoid.
Something I been thinking about, its important to remember that Lunars are not automatically friends to solar exlated. It be a mistake to assume that the Lunar that pressured the party to keep going didn't damn well know what the goldie sidereal was saying. If the entire party died but still managed to blow up the city? Could have still been a win by their priorities. But its kinda hard to get a read on them as of right now.
The other thing to consider is that while people think of Gold Faction as pro-Solar, it would be more accurate to say they are pro-Sidereals controlling Solars rather than Sidereals controlling the Realm. It isn't a change of who is in charge but rather who the favored puppet is.
The Cerulean Lute of Harmony, Division of Serenity headquarters,
The Most Perfect Lotus of Heavenly Design,
Yu-Shan, the heavenly city
In the end, you granted yourself the time necessary to finish your reports — they described the same events but there are many distinct ramifications to the destiny and stability of Bittern and the larger region. Some details pertain more or less to the differing remits of your Division as opposed to the Convention on the Centre, and they needed to be tailored accordingly. You also wrote a summary for Lew, as promised. He occasionally gets himself into trouble by omitting 'unnecessary' details.
The work resonated deeply with your Essence, leaving you as restored and refreshed as if you'd spent the hours resting in bed. By the time you stepped out of the house, you felt genuinely ready to face the day.
The Cerulean Lute almost glows beneath a cloudless sky. The Unconquered Sun has just pulled ahead in the Games of Divinity, his temporary victory heralded by blinding sunlight across all of Heaven. Gods of means take shelter beneath delicate parasols and silk awnings — those without find what shade they can while waiting for it to pass.
Even from a distance, the elaborate contours of the Lute's supernatural construction make it look more like a work of art crafted of glass and blue stone than a building. Its grounds contain vast gardens and tranquil pathways, surrounded on all sides by one of Yu-Shan's most popular pleasure districts. Theatres, galleries, restaurants, and brothels — most pale in comparison to the wonders found within the Lute itself.
You avoid the main entrance. The various entertainments housed here, to be used freely by all gods, are popular on even a slow day. The Sun's grandstanding means that some of the public areas will be downright crowded by spirits seeking respite from the heat. Fortunately, while its interior is complex and winding, the Cerulean Lute is downright straightforward to navigate compared to the Forbidding Manse of Ivy or the Golden Barque of the Heavens. It has a sort of flowing, asymmetrical logic to its layout that had only taken you a matter of months to become used to.
The entrance you use is hidden behind an attractive stand of cherry trees seemingly permanently in full blossom. You slip inside the small door set into an inset section of wall, automatically shaking your hair to dislodge pale blue flower petals. You find yourself at the bottommost landing of a gently curving staircase that hugs the interior of much of the building, the steps wide and pebbled in turquoise for easy traction. You take a moment to savour the cool, sweet-smelling air before beginning a familiar climb.
Light filters in through regular windows along the stairwell's winding length, gentled by stained glass in a variety of blues. Each window that you pass depicts a slightly different image of the same flower, gradually growing taller and taller as you go on, glass petals unfurling. You count the windows quietly in your head, a simple method of keeping track of how close you are to your floor.
You come this way sometimes even on quieter days. The calming beauty of the stairwell seldom fails to set your mind at ease, giving you a pleasant transitional space between the noise and traffic of the city outside and your office.
You stop at your landing, pushing open the doorway here to let yourself out into a broad, office-lined corridor. Blue-stained doors are set into the walls at regular intervals, interspaced by plush benches against the walls. Clusters of desks sit in several places, staffed by clerks and other minor functionaries. The entire corridor is illuminated by a ceiling of curving glass panels overhead. Above the low murmur of voices, you can hear distant music drifting up from somewhere below.
Immediately in your path, several gods are finishing a conversation. One of them stops short at seeing you, giving you a polite smile, gesturing at you with the folded fan in her hand. "Singular Grace — good to see you on your feet. There are some very dire rumours drifting around about that last trip to Creation you made." The goddess in question takes the form of a handsome, middle-aged woman wearing robes covered in intricate leaf patterns. A young man follows in her wake, his arms overburdened by a slightly precarious stack of paper.
You offer her a polite smile in return. "Exaggerated, I'm sure. Your well-wishes are appreciated though, Pherula." Gentle Pherula is the Divine Provisioner of Maiden Tea, the ambitious and well-connected goddess of Creation's most popular contraceptive.
Beside Pherula, the young man is looking at you a little blankly from over the top of his load, as if trying to place you without outright asking. You take pity on him. "Hello to you as well, Talent," you say.
"I wasn't sure if we'd met before," he says, hunching a little in on himself.
"Only once," you say, smoothly lying for his benefit. You have, in fact, introduced yourself to him at least three times before — Pherula's office is near enough to yours that you've encountered him before in the several years since you arrived in Heaven.
Mortals aren't commonly employed by the Celestial Bureaucracy in general, short-lived and powerless as they are. Pherula symbolically adopts the accidental children that result from the rare failure of maiden tea, however, and has a habit of occasionally bringing them up to heaven when their situation on Creation is bad enough. It's not as though you're in any position to criticise with that kind of familial practice, but their lack of the same immunity to Arcane Fate that the Bureau's gods have can be inconvenient.
"Well, I must be going. Lovely seeing you, Grace," Pherula says, tossing off another smile, and flicking her fan open as she leaves. "Try to keep up, darling."
The latter is for Talent, who had been attempting to offer you a bow without completely dislodging his papers. He settles for a little dip instead, and turns to catch up with his mother's rapidly retreating form.
You suppress a smile, and continue onward to your own office a few doors down, marked by a silver nameplate etched with the name "Singular Grace, Chosen of Venus" in both Old Realm characters and High Realm script. The lesser god sitting at the desk beside the door gets to his feet, bowing neatly at your approach. "Lady Grace! You look well."
"Well enough. Thank you, Bell," you say. While each Division has formal robes of office, those are mostly saved for special occasions. Day to day while in the office and working in Heaven, most Sidereals opt for Ambrosia-wrought finery from their culture of origin. You aren't an exception, having long ago settled on a slightly conservative rendition on Realm bureaucratic robes, favouring soft greys and blue-greys. Today's outfit suits you very well and it helps that your visible wounds are largely healed.
"I was a little worried at first," he says, fidgeting with his overly-large spectacles. Forest Bell takes the form of a slight, wispy young man. His complexion is a reddish brown you often associate with far-Easterners, a flower crown woven through his green hair. Once a god of an obscure marriage practice, he had lost most of his purview when the peoples who still practiced it had largely died out. This had seen him demoted to clerk — becoming your assistant has been a step up from that.
He's also very sweet in a way that lets you forget that he's a centuries-old spirit. "Well, I'm well enough," you say. You step past him to push open your office door. He snatches up a board of papers, and follows you.
Like most Sidereals eventually do once they have the pull to do so, you'd traded in the cozy confines of your original office for something larger and more practical. Compared to some, you keep things relatively comfortable. A row of large windows at the back of the room lets in the morning light, illuminating a large mahogany desk organised exactly as you'd left it. Your desk is flanked by wooden bookshelves and cabinets filled with useful supplies and texts. In front of the desk is a carpet with a floral pattern in blue, as well as a table and seating for entertaining. The walls are hung with art and ornamentation, some gifts, some that you'd picked out yourself.On the wall directly behind your desk is a very lifelike painting of the Imperial City. Directly opposite it, above the door, an ornate Varangian-style clock quietly ticks away.
Bell shuts the door behind you as you make your way toward your desk. "I've prepared the minutes from the last Convention on the Centre meeting for you to go over, my lady," he says, crossing over to lay a thick sheath of paper down on your desk.
"Yes, thank you," you say. It had occurred early on, while you'd been dealing with the Bittern situation. Unfortunately, given the ongoing state of the Blessed Isle, it is unlikely to be a dry read. "Is there anything in particular that needs my attention today, beyond the usual?" Things will pile up, of course, now that you're back behind your desk, but you can start planning out your day from an optimistic standpoint.
"The destiny planning committee for the Calinti Secession Day festival is convening in the Lute this afternoon," Bell says.
"Has something gone wrong with that again? Or, right with it, I suppose." Your voice doesn't show much enthusiasm. It is important, for a variety of reasons, that the entire thing be a dismal failure this year, but heroic feats on the part of several Calinti officials keep salvaging it.
"Just a routine update as far as I know," he says.
"Put it on my schedule anyway," you say. "I should hopefully have time to go over these minutes, after I fill out a form for the Crimson Panoply about a city-killing artifact."
"Shall I make you tea in the meantime?" Bell asks.
"Yes, thank you, Bell," you say. You find yourself studying a scroll hanging on the wall over his shoulder. It contains a quotation from the Immaculate Texts in High Realm calligraphy, describing the Exalted as dutiful gardeners tending to Creation. It had been a gift from Shajah Holok a few years before, after a personal low point involving a very bleak destiny you'd overseen. At the time, it had helped. "I have some documents for you to deliver. There is something else I have for you today, though."
Your reports will adequately inform the Bureau, including your faction, of the potential threat that the mystery Lunar poses. You started this, though, and so you feel you have a responsibility to look into the matter yourself.
As the loving gardener must uproot a weed to save the rest of her plants, so must the Exalted see to all of Creation.
Near the Forbidding Manse of Ivy, Division of Secrets headquarters,
The Most Perfect Lotus of Heavenly Design,
Yu-Shan, the heavenly city,
The following day
Work, both official and otherwise, consumes the entirety of the day, and most of the night. The Cerulean Lute, famously concerned with the comfort of its members, has excellent chefs on-staff, and more than sufficient facilities for you to take meals and freshen up without ever having to leave the office.
It leaves you feeling at least reasonably on top of things when you depart in the late hours of the morning, setting out across the Most Perfect Lotus in the direction of the Division of Secrets. You have two very different Oracles to meet with today, after all.
The Forbidding Manse looms up among the sprawl of the Perfect Lotus, an austere edifice of white stone choked in dark green ivy. What windows it has emit no light, staring darkly out at the surrounding neighbourhood. The closer one gets to the Manse itself, the denser the lesser buildings get, seeming almost to huddle together for protection.
Despite the morning light overhead, you enter into a dim maze of back alleys and side streets, passing obscure bookstores, shadowy parlours, and little shops specialising in everything from stationary to antiquities of dubious origin. The sort of places that, to the uninitiated, might seem to be perfect for clandestine meetings or private conversation.
You find the place you're looking for without too much wandering, thankfully. A tall and narrow coffee house, seemingly built to fill the too-small space between the buildings directly adjacent to it. Its door is marked enigmatically with the sign of a broken key. The moment you push it open and step past the threshold, you're struck by the scent of coffee beans and freshly brewed coffee, the darkly pleasant aroma seeming to fill the poorly lit space entirely.
A counter takes up most of the space immediately in front of you, with a sliver of a hallway skirting around it, marked by faded carpet. Beyond that, curtains and hangings conceal the tables and any customers that congregate around them.
"Hello, Miss, may I help you?" Asks a voice like a whisper. A goddess steps out of the shadows behind the counter, eight black eyes staring out of an otherwise pretty face, wisps of cobweb clinging to her hair. It is a mark of how long you've been living in Yu-Shan that you don't flinch. As a mortal, you might have outright fled in terror.
"Yes. I'm here to meet a colleague, Sapphiria the Night-Lily," you say. Noise is curiously dampened in here, as if the very air is trying to assure you that what you say won't carry and won't be overheard. That's almost never actually true, so close to the Forbidding Manse. You realise that you can't actually see the ceiling — the sorcerous candles set in sconces along the walls don't seem to penetrate the gloom that far up. It strikes you as suspicious.
The spider goddess looks at you doubtfully, seeming to register your eyes fully for the first time. "I don't recall anyone by that name. Could you describe them?" she asks.
"I doubt you'd find her memorable," you say.
The air is filled with laughter, deep and rich. A hand snakes out from around the corner, fingers capped with decorative golden talons seizing the goddess by the chin. "Is she right?" a green-eyed woman asks, voice nearly a purr. "Am I forgettable?"
The goddess swallows nervously. The anatomy of her face doesn't allow her to go wide-eyed, but she seems to be at a complete loss for words. "I... no!" she manages.
"Oh, Silk! And after everything that's happened between us! I'm wounded." She puts a heartbreaking inflection into her voice.
"Sapphiria, leave the poor woman alone." You give her a look.
With another laugh, Sapphiria releases the dazed goddess. "Two cups of your jasmine for the second table on the right," she says. Then she turns on her heel and slinks back around the corner, clearly expecting you to follow.
Faintly bemused but trying to remain visibly disapproving, you do so, trailing her deeper into the dim interior of the coffeehouse. You duck the trailing tassels of the curtain that had originally obscured her from your view. "Have you ever actually met that goddess before in your life?"
"Once. The last time I was here. The conversation lasted exactly long enough to find out her name is Silk." Even after years in Yu-Shan, Sapphiria's Ys accent is thick and musical, notably distinct from Flametongue spoken around much of the Dreaming Sea. Its rise and fall reminds you of water flowing over stones.
"Lying to her wasn't nice, then," you say. Even if she'll forget all about Sapphiria and her torrid insinuations again soon enough.
Sapphiria laughs again. She stops at a low table painted with a chipped, silvery key pattern, and sinks elegantly down to lounge against the pillows waiting around it. "Oh, Grace. Sometimes you're so adorably ethical that I just want to put you in my pocket and take you home. So you can be my conscience full-time."
Once, your work took you to the Island of Gralon, in the deep Southeastern corner of Creation. There, the ancient city of Ysyr rises up amid the mountains to subjugate all that it can touch. The people of the wider island speak of Ysyr's sorcerers in tones of fear. As warped and altered by the unnatural energies of their city as any Ys, they wield a power that they use to reshape themselves into beings of terrible beauty and endless cruelty. Slowly flensing away their pity and their humanity along with all physical imperfection.
You'd conveyed this last to Sapphiria once — you've never seen her laugh quite as long or as hard.
Objectively speaking, Sapphiria is the most heartbreakingly beautiful human you have ever met. She's tall, all long, slender limbs and elegant curves. Dark for a Ys, her skin is a flawless tan, her hair a wavy black cascade falling to her waist and framing a face with features sharp enough to cut glass. She surveys you with bright green eyes heavily lined in kohl, an enigmatic smile curving her lovely lips, currently painted with a dusting of gold. At her throat, seemingly set into her flesh itself, is a smooth, faintly luminous green gem, fully revealed by her black, dramatically-cut dress's plunging neckline. A delicately wrought tiara of cold iron rests on her brow and decorative golden chains twine the length of her bare arms.
The result is not aesthetically displeasing.
You sink down onto the pillows opposite to Sapphiria, glancing at her outfit briefly. "I wouldn't think you would have room for pockets in an outfit like that."
She smiles at you. You can't prove it, but you swear she must have left her teeth just a little bit sharper than she had to. "I might read more into that comment, coming from someone else. But speaking of clothing: You seem like you're dressed for an interesting sort of meeting."
She's not entirely wrong. You're wearing a grey, long-sleeved top with a cloud motif along the sleeves over simple trousers in a slightly darker shade. Your hair is pinned back practically, keeping it well clear of your eyes. A blue sash around your waist is one of the few aesthetic flourishes in what is obviously an outfit intended to be both presentable enough to wear outside but also suitable to train in.
"We'll be talking about the Bittern incident, but we won't only be talking," you say, offering her a light shrug. "He is my teacher as well, remember."
Sapphiria grimaces at that, only half affectation. "Well. Better you than me. The closest I've come to learning anything from him have been some very frustrating assign— Oh! Your poor nose!" she adds the last very abruptly, and leans forward to get a better look, having just noticed what's left of the cut that Flotsam left on your face.
"It shouldn't leave a scar," you say. You have access to some of the greatest healers alive, but they don't tend to heal things like purely cosmetic scarring without something in return.
"Who do you need me to curse for this?" Sapphiria asks. Her tone is light, as it always is when she makes this offer. You're still sure that if you ever take her up on it, she would be absolutely delighted to follow through.
You shake your head. "No, that isn't necessary. He's dead, one of the Solars who attacked Bittern."
"Well then. I certainly won't mourn for him," Sapphiria says, settling back against the pillows. "But really! You spend so much of your time doing these things. Running yourself ragged. Putting yourself into mortal danger. All just to try and right that sinking ship full of ingrates that you call an empire. Don't you ever get sick of it?"
"Yes," you admit, "but I'd get tired of the consequences of ignoring them faster. That 'sinking ship' is my home."
Sapphiria sighs, full of long-suffering despair. "That's my good little authoritarian stooge, I suppose."
You raise your eyebrows. "Says the sorcerer-prince."
Sapphiria clasps a theatrical hand to her chest. "Please! I am but a humble slave to the Maiden of Secrets and to all Creation. As I once was to my fair Ysyr."
To your understanding, the Ysyri notion of enslavement is strange and contradictory, seeming to interchangeably encompass a sort of honourable service to the city state as often as it does more recognisable forced labour and chattel slavery. What is actually meant by it seems to largely depend on who is using the word, and about whom. It's an extremely frustrating philosophical moving target even before you get into Sapphiria's periodic claim to being a slave of Jupiter, something which few other Sidereals are particularly comfortable with.
The spider goddess appears standing above your table, carrying a tray of tarnished silver that she sets down on the table between you and Sapphiria. Two cups of steaming coffee sit there, smelling genuinely heavenly, although notably absolutely nothing like jasmine. "Thank you, Silk," Sapphiria says, casting the goddess a smile. She picks her cup up despite how hot it still is, seemingly just to savour the scent.
"Has your paperwork flood let up at all?" you ask, taking the opportunity to change the subject.
"Oh, no. Not in the slightest yet. It's annoying and unreasonable." Sapphiria gestures with her coffee cup in a way that makes you increasingly anxious that she's going to spill it.
"Didn't you kill a Prasadi goddess?" you ask, frowning at her. You've never quite gotten the full story about what happened in Kamthahar — things have been too hectic over the past weeks.
"Of course not!" Sapphiria says, and the hurt look in her eyes makes part of you want to immediately apologise for having accused her of such a thing. "I merely invoked the Terminal Sanction to imprison a nosy, meddlesome little bitch of a garden goddess. She's fine and will be right as rain." Sapphiria lets the hurt look drop away, replacing it with a thin, cruel smile. One of the problems with associating with a student of Black Claw Style is that they are literally experts at playing the victim and manipulating an audience. It's usually not something you let yourself forget, with Sapphiria.
She continues: "Right as rain as soon as someone finds her at least. I put her in a handy stone. I may have even tossed the stone the Dreaming Sea afterward. Who can say? They'll find her eventually if it's really all that important. I have seen far worse things done for far less provocation while I was still in service to my former mistress." Something odd flickers in Sapphiria's eyes at this last comment. She usually avoids speaking about the sorcerer-prince she had previously been apprenticed to, and when the woman does come up, the references are always studiously vague. You already know far more about the situation than almost anyone in Heaven, but only to a point.
"That seems rash," you say, tentatively taking a sip of coffee. It is slightly too hot in addition to being overpoweringly bitter like all coffee is, tasting absolutely nothing like jasmine. That feels like false advertising to you — it had lulled you into a false sense of comfort by making you think of jasmine tea.
"I had just cause," Sapphiria says, as if this is a trifle. She has the self-satisfied air of a cat being chastised for brutalising a songbird: unrepentant and likely to repeat the offence in the future. "I was in Prasad hunting a raksha at the direct behest of the Convention on the Wyld. She played stupid games and deliberately got in my way — obstructing a Sidereal in the apprehension of a dangerous enemy of fate is quite illegal. And did you know that more or less every notable Prasadi deity is also guilty of a few fairly serious crimes, as a matter of course? Just how that absurd contrivance of an empire works. It's not enforced by Heaven and obviously isn't a priority, to say nothing about the political mess it would be. But it's very convenient for this sort of thing as long as I can scrape together the proper evidence and still get the job done. And I did." She slips a cold iron bangle off her wrist, examining it in the faint light — its band is twisted in a spiral pattern, a pattern of staring eyes scattered over its surface.
You give her a half-weary sort of look. It's extremely like her to stay within the letter of the heavenly law, while making things as difficult as possible. "Why are you in trouble, then?"
Sapphiria rolls her eyes extravagantly. "That's only the Fecund Court's allies in Heaven making a fuss. Forcing me to justify my actions. Calling them too extreme, eccetera, eccetera. The Convention on the South isn't particularly pleased that I kicked a hornet's nest, but neither the Convention on the Wyld nor the Forbidding Manse are actually willing to throw me to the dogs, under the circumstances." She leans back, looks directly up at the shadowy ceiling, and grins, giving a cheerful little wave to whatever unseen observer the Division of Secrets has saddled with spying on this particular shop.
"I wish you didn't deliberately make so many enemies. The Fecund Court has Exalted descendants, you know," you say.
"I don't feel particularly threatened by the wrath of Clan Akatha. There are benefits to falling out of most peoples' heads the moment they learn who you are. You're very sweet to fret over me, though," Sapphiria says.
You sigh. There's no point in trying to get her to take the risk more seriously than that.
"Oh! Before you make me forget..." Sapphiria leans down, snatching an item up from a bag near to her seat: a small box of dark wood, clasped in bright silver. She sets it down on the table and slides it over to you.
You'd almost forgotten that, ostensibly, her reason for asking you here this morning had been to pass on a gift. Curious, you set your coffee down and pick up the box. Flicking it upon reveals what looks like a sleek hairpin in dark wood, the thicker end carved to suggest a flower. You pick it up to examine it, finding it slightly heavier than you expected.
"There's a seam in the middle," Sapphiria prompts.
Sure enough, a thin seam encircles the centre of the hairpin, invisible if you didn't already know to look for it. You pull the hairpin apart — one half proves to be a hollow cap, sliding free to reveal an elegant writing brush with silvery bristles. You stare at it almost blankly for a long moment. Experimentally, you reach out to it through your Essence.
"Sapphiria, this is an audient brush!" you say, staring at her.
"It is," she says.
"This is too much for a casual gift!" you say. Brushes such as these might be lesser artifacts, but they're still not cheap even for a Bureau member in good standing.
Sapphiria holds up a placating hand. "The Prasadi goddess tried to bribe me with it before things really turned nasty with her. So I didn't have to pay for the thing. And I have one at home already — quite a nice orichalcum piece I inherited from my predecessor. I didn't really have a use for another one." She looks at the brush in your hands, then at you, seeming to approve even more of her decision. "That sort of practical, understated elegance seemed like more your style than mine, and this way you won't have to be fussing about with graphite or charcoal in a pinch quite so often."
"I..." you look down at the brush in your hands. You've never seen one that could be so easily disguised as this, and in a real sense, it is an extremely thoughtful gift. Even a flattering one, put in those terms — it is very much your style, and a magical brush such as this never needs ink and can even dictate notes on its own. Is a thoughtful gift all it is, though? What is she after?
You look up at Sapphiria. Her expression is faintly hopeful, like she very much wants you to accept.
Article:
Social relationships:
As Sidereals, you often find yourselves in the position of building relationships on a foundation of half-truths and outright falsehoods in the line of duty. Utilitarian bonds, one-sided and transitory. Amongst yourselves and those few others who can be relied upon to remember who you are long term, however, you have the capacity to form ties as real as anyone else.
Singular Grace is a guarded, reserved woman with whom true emotional intimacy is only gradually earned. Her worldview is also profoundly coloured by the experiences of her youth, and now guided by the constellation under which Venus Chose her. As the Desperate Maiden had to give up power to get it, Grace must make herself submit to the influence and scrutiny of others in order to grow close to them in turn.
Sapphiria is currently seeking to alter Grace's existing intimacy for her, changing it from "Minor: Sapphiria the Night-Lily (quiet concern)" to "Minor: Sapphiria the Night-Lily (quiet fascination)", offering a token of friendship in order to invite Grace to grow closer to her. She is doing this by directly appealing to another of Grace's intimacies, "Defining: I embody my name". Denying a defining intimacy causes Grace to gain Limit, but this is sometimes worthwhile or necessary.
Do you allow Sapphiria's influence? What do you gain from her in return if you do? Neither of you will outright voice anything truly secret here, but if the conversation proceeds, you will be able to learn things about her that she would not necessarily volunteer under other circumstances.
[ ] [Accept] Learn something new about the nature of Sapphiria's feelings toward her former mistress
Follow the Blue String: When you discover the nature of one character's feelings for another, you are able to follow the strand of fate connecting the two of them to find out how those feelings are returned, whether or not the second character is present.
[ ] [Accept] Learn something new about Sapphiria's ambitions and desires
[ ] [Accept] Learn something new about Sapphiria's political beliefs
[ ] [Reject] Pull back and reject Sapphiria's influence (Gain +2 Limit)
A Circle of five, with one representative from each Division. It's the kind of established working group that the Bureau of Destiny sends to deal with significant snarls in destiny etc. In the meantime, each individual member does their own work for their own division, or sometimes in smaller groups as is convenient.
The factional distribution of Grace's Circle is two Bronze, two Gold, and one independent. This kind of arrangement isn't that uncommon, and it adds a complicating element in terms of what everyone's priorities are at times, and can lead to intra-Circle tension, but like, they all will work for the Bureau and keeping destiny working properly is everyone's job. How individuals work that out amongst themselves can vary.
An example from characters who appeared in the previous quest are Yula, Grace's work friend, and Stinging Nettle, a Bronze Faction Harbinger who Grace worked with for a storyline. Yula and Nettle are from different factions, but are Circlemates and best friends. They seem to manage that by way of just not talking about politics, to the extent that Yula actively refuses to acknowledge when Nettle (or Grace) are participating in things like guiding a Wyld Hunt.
How Grace and her Gold Faction Circlemates manage things between them will be something that will continue to get attention as well go along.
[X] [Accept] Learn something new about the nature of Sapphiria's feelings toward her former mistress
It seems like this information will result in character development for Sapphiria. Mind you, they all would, but this one also has potential backstory built right in!
gggggggg I actually sooooo want to see behind the curtain of her airs to see her actual wants but... uneven relationship yuri... examination of Ysyr... this is exactly why I voted for Sapphiria.... gggggggg
[X] [Accept] Learn something new about the nature of Sapphiria's feelings toward her former mistress
