Valeria was sitting in the window seat of her living chamber when Scry returned, buzzing on its little clockwork wings. It hovered politely near her left ear until she moved some of her long blonde hair to one side, whereupon it settled on the shoulder thus exposed, and delivered its report.
She listened to its buzzing for a few minutes--as always, Scry insisted upon recounting the precise details of the scene it had observed. By now, though she had never visited it in person, she could have done a watercolor painting of the inside of Harold and Douglas's laboratory, and correctly painted everything from the position of the equipment to the fall of shadow through the doorway.
Despite her familiarity with the scene, she listened patiently to everything in Scry's report. As she listened, her face (pale, with a cupid's bow mouth, a small nose and wispy eyebrows over close-set eyes) became even paler, her lips pursing with displeasure. The relative success of the potato cannon was heartening, but the destruction of the lab was a crushing blow--now how was she to gain that technology for herself? It seemed her options were rapidly running out; soon she would have to take her least favorite choice: involving the inventors.
She had been loath to involve them from the start, because the presence of more minds inevitably brought mess to her neat approach. They would no doubt insist upon having some say in how the cannon was used, in the modifications she planned to make to it, and in a thousand other insignificant details. There was no order or organization when dealing with others; it was always so chaotic, so...ragged.
"Darn it," she whispered, drumming her fingers pensively on the window seat. Was there no other way? Then her face brightened as she realized that she did indeed have one more option: she could call on Dodanei, and have him help the inventors to repair their laboratory! She clapped her hands in delight, relief and happiness rippling through her.
Once more smiling, Valeria rose from her window seat and went to the desk, positioned on the opposite wall. As she crossed the room, her eye fell onto her bed, situated precisely halfway down the wall to her left, and what she noticed there was enough to rock her fragile equilibrium: the curtains on her canopied bed were askew--actually askew!--at the end nearest her. When she laid her hand upon the curtain to straighten it, she saw that the lazy maid who had neatened the bed had failed to tuck in one corner of the spread properly, and now there were wrinkles in it. Her lips parted briefly, and a small, high-pitched noise of uncomprehending anger fell from them. This was unacceptable!
She spun on her heel, the skirt of her sensible black dress swirling around her ankles, and headed for the door. It seemed she had more than one new item on her to-do list today.
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