(no subject)

[sythyry]

Giving Her The Money [17 Lage 4385]

When Mellilot demanded passage home, I told her "Tell Zascalle I said to give it to you." Which should not have been a serious problem, but it was. Mellilot stomped back to my parlor two-thirds of an hour later.

Mellilot: "Zascalle is nowhere to be found."

Me: "She's not?"

Kantele: "She and Thiane and the kids are visiting friends in Eigrach for a few days."

Me: "Oh, right. Kantele, could you ... actually, no, you're all sore from bone-pains today. Kantele, could you write the letters to some banks on the way. I'll go and get Mellilot the money."

So we strode and/or flew to the Parlor of Accounting, and I persuaded the moderately-enchanted lockbox to open up. I knew we were low on cash, but it didn't look too bad. The lockbox was half-full of lozens. Single-lozen coins mostly, when it should have been tens and thirty-trees. Presumably Phaniet had fished out all the big coins to take to buy that Grace.

I took the opportunity to make Mellilot feel bad.

Me: "At a guess, we have enough to buy you passage, or to pay everyone their wages, not both. You're in so much of a hurry to get back that you'll delay everyone else?"

Mellilot: "You've been saying you'll mortgage some enchantments for days now. Just go do it. Get them back when your money from Vheshrame gets here. Not a big deal, if you do it today."

Me: "Thank you for the nagging. Get a bag; this'll be a lot of coins."

I reached into the half-full box to scoop out some money. My claws ran into cloth almost instantly.

Me: "What's in here?"

Mellilot and I excavated. The box wasn't half-full of coins. It was half-full of cushions, with coins scattered on top of them to make it look half-full.

Mellilot: "That doesn't look good."

Me: "Oh, dearie." Or something along those lines, but not nearly so polite.

Investigation

I acquired some detectives. Actually, they're not real detectives, they're just clever and/or bold people.

Kantele: "Who can get into the box?"

Me: "I can, you can, Phaniet can, Zascalle can, and a few people can who are buried up in Vheshrame. Or a good sorcerer, but I imagine Vae and I would have noticed that."

Kantele: "Phaniet, pray do me the kindness of ..."

Phaniet: "My nose is at your service, good Kantele!" She sniffed around the box quite carefully. "Fresh scents: Sythyry and Mellilot. Older scents: Zascalle and Thiane. A faint hint of me, from when I paid for the Grace a couple weeks ago."

Me: "You did not put cushions in there, did you?"

Phaniet: "I did not. I combed through the box a good deal, looking for large coins so as to have less to carry into the Verticals, and there were definitively no cushions in there when I left."

Arfaen: "Let me smell too!" She did. "Phaniet's right, that's everyone I smell." Arfaen's loyalty instinct must be cast with seven cley today. [English idiom might be "must be in high gear". No actual cley is involved. -bb]

Kantele: "Which proves fairly little, as anyone capable of getting into the box by magical means would have been capable of hiding their scent as well."

Me: "Well, I can check that." Which took a bit of manipulation of the Eye of Mirizan and Melizan, and other forms of poking. "No magical bypassings of the locks or the nearby space, nor any attempt to hide scent." Which is technically not infallable: a sufficiently good spell could trick me. It would take a very good illusionist indeed, and such people can generally make money in better and quicker and safer ways than stealing from a wizard's lockbox. Or I could have sought the wrong form of intrusion, I suppose, but I had investigated many forms and anyone creative enough to get in by some other way could probably have made money better quicker safer too.

My friends looked at each other, tails twitching nervously.

Kantele: "I am afraid that it is time to inquire of Zascalle."

Me: "I am afraid so too, but she's not on board. Just where is she staying?"

Phaniet: "Thiane's clan-friends."

Kantele: "For the last several days."

Yerenthax: "Financial fiends, us fleeing from / A battle bodes. It calls; I come. And the first line means they're fleeing from us, not us from them."

Me: "You may be right, though I do hope we can settle this without a pitched battle in the streets of Eigrach. Yerenthax, Jyondre, will you do me the kindness of accompanying us? Both in case it does come to violence, and because the Eigrach city guard thinks well of you, and that will help when we are arrested."

Comments

[rowyn]

Hmmm.

Hmmmmmmm.

There are many possibilities here, of course, but some that come to my mind immediately are:

A) Zascalle has been embezzling from you for a long time, and does not expect you to catch her now because you haven't caught her before. In which case she & family might be in Eigrach.

B) Zascalle has been embezzling from you for a long time, and expects you to catch her now because there's not enough money left in the strongbox to disguise her thefts. In which case, she & family have been traveling for several days at top speed the hell away from Eigrach.

C) She decided to embezzle from you after the nendrai got her kids killed and one of them half-demonized, based on her belief that you weren't trying hard enough to (1) protect them and (2) fix Feralan. Also, because Thiane knew you were lying about Feralan. In which case, she & family have been traveling for several days at top speed the hell away from Eigrach.

All things considered, I find (C) the most likely. I don't think there's any point in going into Eigrach to look for her. There may not even be any point in using Ke Lo to find her and/or family, though it depends how much money she stole, how fast & expensive passage on a skyboat in Eigrach is, and how much power you can get into a Ke Lo spell. Top range with an arcane connection is P miles, right? Come to think of it, you could probably muster quite a lot of power hammercasting a location spell.

Assuming you don't want Vae looking for them, which I assume you don't. You're way over doom quota already.

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

I continue to write up the events of the day!

But yes, I am hoping to keep Vae out of the matter. It is bad enough already, and I daresay I can cause enough disasters all on my own.

[heavenscalyx.livejournal.com]

Oh, dear.

But hasn't Zascalle been with you for a long time? Why would she embezzle now? And in such a bad location?

ETA: Oh, right, Feralan. Still. Seems unwise.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Isn't there a bright-winged messenger variant that goes much much farther than that? The general idea of 'make an elemental to track them' is how Vae usually finds distant things, at any rate; I'm sure primes have a variant.

unwise?

[sianmink.livejournal.com]

Some would probably say the same thing about traveling on a long vacation with an infamously traff and powerful wizard on a skyboat full of wrongfolk and a terrible monster.

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

[OOC: Bard promises that Zascalle will have a chance to explain herself! But you're right, Feralan. And Ochirion. And Sythyry working zir tail off to save Quendry but not doing anything useful for Feralan. And the nendrai's still here.]

Re: unwise?

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

At this point, the infamously traff and powerful wizard kinda agrees!

[kensan-oni.livejournal.com]

Cue a Chorus of "A Pirates Life for Me!" and let DOOM commence!

[heavenscalyx.livejournal.com]

I gather that Zascalle and Thiane aren't actually mages of any variety and cannot wrap their heads around, "Some illnesses are straightforward and easy to treat with the right tools, and some illnesses are bloody mysterious and possibly unique and require better resources to research the cure"? Or possibly could, if it weren't about the small children, I suppose.

It just seems remarkably unwise and unhealthy to embezzle from a powerful wizard with a nendrai. At least as unwise/unhealthy, and possibly moreso, than staying on the airship with them.

Re: unwise?

[heavenscalyx.livejournal.com]

Yeahhhh, there's that.

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

It is well-known that even a great wizard can't do much at a range of two or three hundred miles, much less the many thousands of miles between here and (say) Ketheria. If she gets far enough away and far enough lost, and is willing to use money to protect herself, she might well get away with the crime. It is quite a big tree, after all.

And I am not known as terribly fierce or persistent about vengance, I don't think.

[heavenscalyx.livejournal.com]

I look forward to seeing how Thiane is feeling about all this, given that she's got to have some loyalty to her fellow wrong-folk, and even if there's a degree of terror of Vae and even of you (or some sense of being betrayed and/or wronged by you), she's got to be aware that Zascalle's thievery will thoroughly screw (not in the fun way) all these other people.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

That may possibly be because it hasn't come up too often before - but it might not do to present the image of being one easily stolen from while traveling and thus far away from the laws of one's home!

Especially while one's flying ship of impressiveness is temporarily held fast for necessary repairs, and thus potentially strangers might be coming aboard to perform these tasks, and might be presented with temptations to theft.

I counsel fierce and persistent repossession of the money!

Re: unwise?

[kris-schnee.livejournal.com]

Sythyry, could you please remind us what the schedule for your vacation was? I remember you paid one hundred years' Smith Guild dues in advance, but were your crewmembers expecting to spend the rest of their lives on Strayway?

[sianmink.livejournal.com]

repairs that I must point out were because of some others who had the impression of easystealfromability.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Technically, the damage was incurred during the fierce and persistent repossession stage.

Re: unwise?

[terrana.livejournal.com]

I recall (but haven't actually checked to verify) that in the entry in question, Sythyry stated that zie would only be gone a couple of years, but wanted to get the rest out of the way all at once, at least partly to annoy the guild treasurer.

[goodluckfox.livejournal.com]

What about time travel? You may have borrowed from yourself? Also what scent on the cushions?

[kensan-oni.livejournal.com]

In that case, wouldn't you leave yourself a note saying that it was an emergency and you had to borrow some of your own money?

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

In an emergency, who has time to write a *note*?

Although I guess you could have saved the note you found in the box when you opened it and discovered the money gone...

Re: unwise?

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

1-2 years.

[kensan-oni.livejournal.com]

What money emergency in the tree would be required so quickly that you couldn't take 45 seconds to write a note, and spatter some soda on it so that it doesn't smear too badly?

[shurhaian.livejournal.com]

The sort of wizard who spends a day and some in the hour after dawn can probably afford a few moments to write a note.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

You'd be amazed how little time-travel helps with that sort of thing. Running simulations through the oroboros system reveals that time travellers arrive five minutes too late 95% of the time!

[kensan-oni.livejournal.com]

This is why all GOOD Time Lords get their own Theme Song...

[stormydragon.livejournal.com]

She's been living on the strayaway for quite some time, so her hair is likely all over the place. How much do you need to have an arcane connection?

Bring Him Here would be easy enough, but a connection version of Spider Weaves the Roads would probably be more fun.

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

See the next entry, when my translator gets around to it.

[stormydragon.livejournal.com]

I hope it's Spider Weaves the Road. Something about that spell greatly amuses me and I hope to see it used someday. ;>

[greenreaper.livejournal.com]

Or failing that, temptations to join in with all the highly interesting activities that appear to be going on in other areas of the Strayway.

[redbird]

Another possibility is that she is embezzling for one of the semi-standard reasons, such as a gambling problem or that she is being blackmailed. Embezzlers in that sort of situation either don't have, or don't think they have, much control over the timing. (In some parts of my world, people also embezzle to pay medical bills, but that seems unlikely in this case.)

[allessindra.livejournal.com]

... Having been off LJ for most of a year, I find myself thoroughly amused and completely bewildered by the current crop of Doom(tm). I'm faced with swallowing my curiousity whole or dragging myself through LJ and/or wherever the archives are currently living to catch up.....

.....

decisions, decisions.

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

I can send you Sythyry's Vacation in one big HTML file, from the beginning, if that helps the decision...

[allessindra.livejournal.com]

Ha. And I never saw this. And so have spent the last two days dragging myself through LJ, as dragging myself through not-LJ was just too annoying.

Ah well, I needed something to do to distract me from EBZ-refresh.