In the Wax Museum

A tiefling bride with blacked out eyes. — The Duchess

Fawn, the deeper into the museum you get, the less comfortable your little guide Carby becomes. She's tart and slick on the streets of Dementlieu, scuffing her boots along the curbs and tilting her chin briskly at well-dressed passers-by, but she's nervous and picking at her cuffs as you travel down, down the spiral. The museum is lit by torches that give no heat, and as you spiral down to the first duchess, the color of the light they emit changes little by little from golden to white, until in the depths it feels colder, even if it isn't. Is it really deep? Or did the building itself turn and extract itself as you stepped "down" the winding stairs?
"The grey? Why, that's when the Queen takes her up," says Cardy. She waves her arm around and up, at all the statues. "Becomes the duchess, you know. This is all showing you when the queen takes her up, all the hers." She gives an involuntary shudder. "Yes, even in the wedding day, she was took up and gone, for the kiss. The first duchess, she married a satyr." A side glance implying like you. **"Sir Rinrock was her husband, but it was -- it was only him beside her when the queen took her up. The rest of the time, the duchess herself had many consorts." Carby leans in and whispers to you, as the sisters examine the dresses and hats on the statues. "Some of them minotaurs." She backs away again. "Then she went false and attacked everyone, had to be locked away. As you know. " The nervous gnome grins, makes motions like she wants to go back up, but Malveen is intrigued by the statues of her mother.
"This is Mama," she says quietly. "She isn't false."
"The new ones, they come whenever the old one goes false," Carby explains. "Or if the Queen has a special pet, well then, the old duchess just went false, didn't she? The true duchess--" Carby points up, all the way up to the top, suggesting the first statues "--did the Queen such a job on the Prime. We never did think we'd have a human duchess but here we are. And she does just as well as any other. "

In the Rose Palace

A white cat with blue eyes. — Traveling avatar of Levistus

**Anya, **Princess Dandelion will absolutely not bring Lehiri into her rooms, expressing immediate and violent disgust at the idea she should be in the presence of a sick person, even leaning toward expelling her and you from the Rose Palace entirely, followed by a thorough cleaning by Aspen and Linden, even if it takes them their whole lives. It takes a lot of promises that magical quarantine is keeping all the air from the "oozing nasty" from her lungs to soothe her back into evaluating jewelry, but it doesn't matter anyway, because it takes the cat three days to come.

Three days during which time the tiefling's health improves, the dragon roams, Malyth and the Lady of Blades dart out into the hedge maze and return exhausted, sometimes not even returning in the evening, and your prime food is getting depleted. The Gift eats some fey folk of the maze, with no consequences. Malyth and Whisper cannot stop the dares. You can do prayers, and play with your cat, and tidy up your memorization of some minor axioms of Torm. No word comes from Fiora for these three days, of course, in this nonsense blender of upside down reality, it might not have been three days for her. It might not even be three days for you, if you try and count how many towels have been used or how many tally marks the rogues have carved into the beautiful bedposts, or how many times the Tiefling has received your healing spells. It feels like three days. The sun here travels in parabolas.

"Because you're waiting," says Aspen, reinforcing the quarantine spells. "But maybe it'll be just a small amount. Could be three seconds, or minutes, or three days, or thirty days, or three years, or three hundred years, or three thousand years, or three hundred thousand--" Linden smacks her with a rag and she reels and coughs. "So far, this is just a small amount of waiting." She turns her head toward you slowly and her mouth ripples in what could develop into an encouraging smile, but immediately resets as a flat line. "We'll see."

When he comes, he comes into the bedchamber, and time stops. The wan little fairy who's pulling back the curtains freezes, Lehiri's breathing stops, and all the little crystalline specks of magical dust in the air that lend a glittery haze to the corners of the room freeze and crackle. You are not frozen. The cat walks in. He hops up on the bed and walks straight up to Lehiri's chest, and stands there sniffing at her face, arching his neck down to touch the eyelashes with his nose.

"So, she got her," says the cat. "This is mine own."

He bumps his head against the tiefling's cheek, marking it affectionately, sniffs the ears, pats the cheek with his paw, then turns to you.

"I'll have her back to Tantlin, I believe," he says. "Unless you want to fight me for her, Paladin? Are you on your own here? Or is this what Fioravanti intended? That lunatic child. I told her, but she didn't listen. And now, now what? Look what she has done. I would say that she will never listen to me again, but then, she would never listen to me in the first place."

He stands and arches his back, tail a sharp point. Cats are hard to read. But. Can a cat look victorious? At least he looks pleased. Satisfied. Delighted. Triumphant. Is this what you were trying to see?