Going to be a Long Day
Session: 2019-02-04
From where the last account ended — Taeon sitting quietly with his options, the Fusion Queen's map in hand, the stack of open questions in order — things began to move.
The party had a new member. Qwitch: capable, present, practical in the way that useful people tend to be in crisis environments. The records don't give much more than the name from this period. What they do give is a description of something beginning to take shape — the group dynamic clarifying. People who had been in proximity starting to function as something more. Different angles on the same problem, beginning to trust each other's directions.
There was also, at some point, a bluff.
I have not been able to establish exactly what was said or by whom. What the accounts agree on is: someone said something bold. The kind of thing that could have gone very wrong, in a situation where very wrong could mean permanent. It did not go wrong. But it was, by all reports, a tight moment.
— I do not know if Taeon was the source. The voice does not fit what I know of him. But he was present, and the margin was narrow enough that everyone in the room would have felt it.
The corporations were pressing.
The Acreon and the drift rock had accumulated obligations by this point — pressure points where institutional interest became personal demand. There was a Starfinder insignia in it. A black piece of paper. The shape of something being asked that had not yet fully declared itself. Taeon noted this. He filed it with the other open questions and kept moving.
The stack was growing. This was, in retrospect, a characteristic feature of this period in his work: the accumulation of pressures, none yet resolved, each adding weight to the one beneath it.
They came to the Eoxan diplomatic station.
He looked at what was waiting, and said — this is one of the few direct quotes from him that day — Going to be a long day.
He was correct.
The Ambassador's name was Gevelarskanor. Elebrian: which is to say, a member of a people who had once faced extinction and answered it with transformation. Forced to change to survive. That phrase appears in Taeon's notes without annotation, as though it required none. He had studied adaptation. He understood that survival did not always present in familiar shapes.
The robes were purple and yellow. The skull was elongated — the defining characteristic of the elebrian form, a modification that went deeper than cosmetic. Across the figure, markings glowed: something between insignia and identity, holding the station's ambient light and giving it back in a different register. At the edges of the room, floating in the unhurried way of things that do not breathe, were skeletons.
Attendant. Not threatening. Patient in the way that only certain kinds of patience can be.
Gevelarskanor was the head of the Eoxan diplomatic station. An equal citizen of the Pact Worlds. A representative of a place where the dead governed, and where that governance had produced something that could sit across a table from you and speak.
What passed between them — what was asked, what was answered — is not recorded in detail. What is clear is that Taeon was present for all of it, and that he brought the same patient ecological attention to an elebrian diplomat as he had brought to a docking bay and a small pub and a grocery store that was not quite a grocery store.
This is the thing I would ask you to carry away from his example: the attention was not selective. It did not shut down in the presence of the unfamiliar. It expanded.
There was, at some later point, beer in a bucket.
I say this plainly because it matters. The session had included a near-fatal bluff and the full presence of the Eoxan undead. They were permitted to laugh.
It was a brief forgetting — a few hours in which the older weights, the losses that had brought each of them to this investigation, lifted from the room.
Taeon had carried his losses the whole session in the way he always carried things: present, unremarked, available but not on display. I do not know whether he laughed. I know he was there. I think, for a person who moved through the world as carefully as he did, being there was its own kind of participation.
The questions were still open, the Acreon crew still missing, the Fusion Queen still waiting. But the records from this point forward describe a person with slightly more range than before. More room. The kind of thing that happens when you are tested and find yourself holding.
He had predicted a long day. He had been right. And he had gotten through it, which was also, in its way, a kind of answer.
The next account will tell you what he did with it.