“I don’t think Lye has risen so far up the proverbial ladder to be brought to his knees by the blatantly fucking obvious.”

Philomel frowned as the other woman spoke for the first time in thirty minutes. Frowning a little at the corner of her mouth she looked over, brows creasing.

“... I’m sorry?” came Shinsou's answer. Pretty much summing up what the faun's thoughts were on the statement.

Lillith waked to a chair and elegantly set herself down in it. Her black hair barely moved and her kimono folded perfectly as she brought her legs up beneath her. Philomel was partly too stunned at this gorgeous bliss to comment.

"“He’s a master of spies. A tyrant. A man perfectly capable of genocide without losing any sleep. He will expect somebody to come for him, ‘in the dead of night’, and we will walk straight into a nightmare.”

“So ... you have an idea?” Philomel half asked, half-stated in a low, slightly taken aback voice. The wine in her hand shimmered underneath the candlelight of the brackets in the wall, calling to be drunken. But ... she couldn't right now. She honestly was just too stunned.

Absolutely.” The Akashiman sat with her back straight and began to fumble, but delicately so, with the hem of her dress. “I think it’s appropriate for me to say at this point I am not concerned with right and wrong.” Her eyes bore into Shinsou's. “Others in the world will see us as murderers and thieves. Chronicle is concerned only with balance, and ensuring that the people stuck in between these petty wars and hatreds don’t suffer.” As her eyes drifted away from the Telgradian's Lillith leant forwards and reached for the jug of wine. Finding a spare goblet she avoided Mao as she slowly sniffed her way across the papers on the table, and then Lillith began to pour herself some wine. Gesturing briefly for Philomel's she refiled it, before setting the jug back down.

And then she raised a spare finger and gently traced three Akashiman glyphs in the air, that burnt in an orangey light when they were drawn. It made Philomel suddenly sieze, and she would have panicked, had she not remembered that Lillith was Shinsou's trusted friend and he would not deliberately place Philomel in trouble, ever ...

Would he?

“Leopold said you were…dedicated.”

Philomel blinked. Wait, did I just miss something here? she began to wonder as Shinsou spoke his line. But then Lillith was talking again.

“Thank you for truncating my brother’s tendency to bitch.” The Akashiman rolled her eyes. “His involvement in the slave trade is why I am here. We should either infiltrate his next shipment, sneak into the fortress that way, as he once did to me … or we should send a Geiko from Akashima’s new government and use the festival as a distraction.”

Geiko. Essentially another word for geisha, what Lillith potentially was, with her ornamental traditional dress and makeup. The idea of sending an envoy, maybe even a group of envoys to the Seventh Sanctum ... That was crazy. Crazy good. Interesting. Something that got Philomel's heart racing again. Geisha! Professional entertainers! Sakura!

“Big ambitions," Shinsou muttered.

“With Duffy as a brother you go big or go home," the Akashiman replied.

But Philomel was already grinning. “It’s certainly an idea,” she smirked. “What do you think Shinsou?”