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| Details |
| Author: | Athena |
| Summary: | The cogs of the first reputable and dedicated Stormwind Detective Agency continue to turn as Siamus Fallon formally introduces the other lady with a particular set of unexpected and useful detective skills, Natalyah Kensington-Whit, to the office, and sets her at the first Mystery. 5k~ words. |
| Rating: | T for Teen |
Arc: Apex Investigations
The street on which Natalyah used to live has undergone a dramatic transformation since that time. So-called "Resurrection Row" now features close, neat ranks of stately modern townhouses, designed more in keeping with Gilnean or Kul Tiran architecture than Stormwind's native, squat timber-and-stone structures. Each building boasts a broad bay window on the ground floor to the left of the entrance for shops or offices to come, palladium windows on each of two residential floors above, and dormers for the uppermost garret apartment.
At the first of these buildings, on the southwestern streetcorner, a discreet shingle beside the main entry reads PRIVATE INVESTIGATIONS. Up the few stairs from the street and just inside on the left, a sturdy wooden door is set with an upper glass pane that bears the same neatly-stenciled inscription.
Through the door, the office's reception space is a comfortable room designed more like a study than a commercial waiting room. A pair of armchairs are arranged by the bay window on the left with a tea table between them. There is a rack of newspapers and a bookcase along the far wall, and a polished wooden reception desk on the right. The bookcase at the moment bears only a few library-standard reference volumes, the newspaper rack the early and late editions of yesterday's Stormwind Herald, and the desk a plain blotter and a cup of pens.
Behind the reception desk, four doors open into four neat offices. To the side of the reception desk on the far wall beside the bookcase is a fifth door; this one opens into an employee lounge of sorts, furnished with cupboards, a table and chairs, and a settee.
Admiral Siamus Fallon, in an aristocratic blue suit that suggests he's just come from the House of Nobles, stands before the tea table and armchairs gazing out the bay window, his hands clasped behind his back. His expression is distant. He looks somehow indefinably older since the Fallon Gala; the vital light that usually blazes within him is shuttered now, and without it he seems tired and thinner, less of a Presence, like a man recovering from a long illness.
Natalyah is late.
She's dressed in daringly cut spaghetti strap and flowing silhouette sun dress of scalloped tiers of bright orange rimmed with black meant to mimic something like the pearl crescent butterfly (although with its similarity to others, it's not as clear as others, possibly considered by the wearer a failure in that regard) that hits just barely below her one knee, her hair wild waves that brush against her bared shoulders. She has a backpack of an adorable little worgen plushie, and another butterfly designed leather camera bag with the strap crosswise over her chest.
She shifts briefly in and out of her worgen form to bound up the stairs, and straight into a levitating human, and opens the door directly the way she might do for any business place.
Two sniffs to the air tells her what she needs to know, and she heads straight to Siamus, floating ominously at a quick pace. "Hello, there you are," she says, before she really looks at him, a frown forming over her brows when she does, even as her smile remains fading slowly.
It is as though her remark reaches Siamus belatedly, their personal soundtracks not quite synced; it is a solid moment before he reacts, blinking out of stillness and turning toward her. His own smile is summoned smoothly. "Miss Kensington-Whit. Here I am." A slight, ironic bow. "Thank ye for coming to meet with me."
Natalyah floats rapidly towards him, her dress fluttering along strangely in the movement, scrutinizing his face.
"Are you okay? You look not quite all like your usual self. Is it because of what happened with the battle, or something else worse and personal? Did you lose your tidesage senses again?" she asks in that absolutely direct way of hers, rapid firing off several questions without waiting for an answer to one.
The swift flood of questions seems to warm him, and his smile widens, if still wearily. "I'm — aye, I'm well enough. Dinnsfield's all right, I trust? He and the lads acquitted themselves well, as expected."
Natalyah slumps a little as she wraps her arms around herself. "Lathrik's probably the same sort of 'well enough.' He's moody and grumpy, and it's all I can do to stop him from letting guilt eat him up entirely. And he doesn't want to talk about what happened," she says with an actual pout to her lips, and a fierce look to her eyes, as she's considered marching off and thrashing the circumstances.
"If I could, I'd be smiting something right about now, but I don't know what level of holy that is to be able to smite time past, all I know is that it isn't anything I've been able to study." But, her tone suggests, don't think she isn't looking for a way to do it now.
Siamus studies her for a grave moment, his smile faded. "I'd tell ye to tell him there's no guilt in it for him," he says quietly, "but I'd have three hundred other men to tell it to as well. And I'd be a hypocrite to tell it to anyone else at all." He looks out the window again. "He's seen worse things. It sounds callous, or like the opposite of consolation, I know, but I can tell ye there's a backward sort of comfort in it sometimes. I've come through worse."
"No, I know what you mean," Natalyah says darkly, staring at a point on the tea table. "The problem with Lathrik is that he puts all sorts of meaning into everything that somehow makes it his fault. He didn't learn enough of what happened before, or he didn't do enough in the moment, or worst of all, that he wasn't enough to begin with." She reaches out to pick at a mug.
"That means he sits and broods on how he might have magically been perfect. And it's horrible because he's the only person he holds to that standard. Everyone else gets mercy and compassion. But not him." Her tone is almost angry, but there's a sorrowful cushioning all around it. "So, obviously, I have to just love him harder until he believes it." She sniffs aristocratically and looks over at Siamus, as if she's expecting a challenge to this ability.
Siamus is still gazing out the window. He smiles faintly, tiredly, without looking at her. "Well," he says at last. "It's lucky he has ye."
He's silent again, and then, "Said much the same to him of you, when we were setting out there."
The silence that meets that statement has a heavy, guilty-like quality. There's another clink of something on the cart, before Natalyah leaves off it, drifting over to the window.
"Anyway, that's Lathrik. Don't tell me you're doing the same thing to yourself, minus a brooding couch. You're not even a paladin," she says pointedly.
"Tides forfend," Siamus says dryly. "I'd make a shite paladin. For any number of reasons." He squints out the window. "I was a commander of the thing, though. My men, my ships." Another pause. "It's seven Fallon ships I've lost in the last two years. And at Bladefist, one of them was my own former ship. Her captain was best man at my wedding." He reaches out to lay fingertips on the glass, as though testing its temperature. "Half my fleet's Kul Tiran. Men that followed me from the isle. They live at Fallon Harbor. I know them, know their families. When I come home to tell a lady I've known a decade and her two children that I've left their man dead in Bladefist Bay…." He shakes his head.
He glances at Natalyah again at last. "But that's no kind of talk ye need to hear. I beg your pardon." He dredges up a smile. "Ye look very well. I am guessing it's… 'a butterfly of some kind' is the best I can do, I fear. I've never made a study of the creatures myself."
Natalyah's only briefly distracted by her favorite subject, looking down at her own dress with part of a smile, and she gives a half-hearted swish. "'A butterfly of some kind' is about what most people could get from this one. There's too many options it could be unless you already know what it's supposed to be. It didn't come out well. Not all of them did," she admits, smoothing a hand down along the top tier.
When she raises her head, she has that fierce sort of sadness in her eyes. "You might think someone like me couldn't possibly understand that feeling. And maybe I can't on that kind of scale. I'm not a commander of so many people, but I was one for one man. I took him with me to Gilneas, as my field assistant, my guard, my first lover. He served me for more than a decade. And I was the one to order him out even knowing there were worgen out there, because I wouldn't stop my research." She raises a hand up to her face, fingers trembling even as she tries to keep her form steady. "I was in his eyes when the worgen pack came. I watched him make the choice to die, saw everything he did to try to buy me time to run so that I could escape. I didn't. But it was still me who lived, and him who died, because I told him to be there."
The words come out rougher, and with no warning whatsoever, she launches herself forward to another impulsive hug as she tells him, "So you might hate yourself right now, but know that I don't hate you."
Siamus freezes, bewildered all over again by this impetuous display of emotion. He stands still for a moment, and then lifts a hand to gingerly smooth her hair. (WWAD: What Would Avrenne Do?) He does not put an arm around her in turn, because gemblemsans. "I'm sorry to hear it," he says quietly, and there's real pain in his tone. "The horror for ye. I'm sorry, miss."
He strokes her hair again — it might be absent-minded now, she has nice hair — and then offers as a dry, half-hearted joke. "I'd never hate myself, though. Have ye seen me?"
Natalyah gives a very unladylike snort, as she pulls back out of the hug to swat the back of her hand against his shoulder, which has the somewhat comical effect of actually moving her back in the air, drifting like a little paper boat on a relatively still lake.
"As if that has ever stopped anyone. Have you seen Lathrik?" she counters rhetorically, as she rights herself in the air. She's all arch wit and honest contrition both at the same time on her face, a war of emotions held simultaneously. "And I'm sorry to hear it, about your people, and your friend."
With that though she tosses her head, her hair floating strangely around her face, looking away from him to scan the tea table again. "Ugh, if we're going to be so maudlin already sober, we might as well earn it and have some actual whiskey or whatever in a coffee. Don't tell me you haven't stocked any, for I really won't believe it."
"It's not my office," Siamus tells her, but he's already moving toward the receptionist's desk. He stoops to open the side cupboard and straightens again with a bottle in hand.
Natalyah lets loose a delighted, wicked laughter as she floats closer to inspect the offering. "Well, that's proof that it's a real office," she teases. "Good to be prepared for the sort of clientele who will seek out a place like this who will probably be the type to drive a person to drink."
Siamus arches a brow at her over a tilted smile. He approaches to tip whiskey into a pair of teacups. "So tell me, then: What d'ye think of this real office? Can I interest ye in being driven to drink, professionally-speaking?"
Natalyah laughs again, as she picks up her teacup, and moves over to one of the chairs, floating over it until she can sit on it, spinning until she's sitting in it sideways, one leg over the chair's arm and her single white sandal dangling from her foot, propped up enough to survey the room from this vantage point.
"It's so real and professional that I half feel like it's trying to tell me I don't belong in it," she says tartly, staring down the rack of newspapers like she's daring it to say it again, louder this time. She waves her teacup through the air. "But I've been told that enough times directly with things I was perfectly capable of doing to not listen to it."
"Oh," says Siamus, "I've seen enough of ye through all this past business to know you're more than up to the work." He has a sip of whiskey. "I believe a certain headstrong tendency will suit a lady well in this line of business. I've got two others aboard as well. I think ye'll like them both."
Natalyah gives the newspapers one last hard stare so they know she's looking away because she wants to and not because she's losing a staring contest with an inanimate objects.
"Who are they? One of them is Aszera, isn't it? I like her, and she did say she might be interested in it for the next thing, and you know what she can do with that other sight of hers. Did she ask you about it after all? Although, for all I know, she's also joined the army like everyone else," Natalyah says, a dark raincloud only metaphorically appearing over her head to rain down.
"One of them may be Aszera, aye, if she's still willing. The business of… well. The business at Theramore made matters… awkward for her, for a time. But she lives in the flat just upstairs, as it happens" — Siamus points at the ceiling — "so I imagine ye'll see her yourself. But one of the two I've arranged already is Mrs. Mayellen Hazan — I don't know if you're familiar?"
Natalyah's head cocks to the side in a canine tilt. "Oh! Yes, of course, she was the warlock with the whole blood thing with the crime scene that I helped with, from Cobalt. She had a nice, serviceable cane, very practical. I've never seen someone use warlock magic with blood before, so it was interesting." She holds up a hand and flicks up a long finger for each point. "She said she could tell if blood is from the same person, if it's from two closely related people, or if it's from unrelated people. It's good, because I can't — "
She bites down on her lip for a moment, and then stubbornly forges on ahead. "Blood smells differently to me than before. It's… harder to focus on it, and stay rational. It brings out the worgen more." The words are defiant, like she expects him to react with disgust or disappointment.
Siamus nods mildly. "The lady is married to a worgen, so I expect ye won't have any… difficulty with her of a personal nature. And she's worked for me before, when she was with the Cobalt Eye. Fine investigator."
"She's married to a worgen?" Natalyah sits up a bit more, bracing a hand against the chair's arm, still holding her whiskey tea cup in the other. "She didn't mention it, but I suppose I didn't ask either. I might have smelled it on her if I'd gotten close enough, but that would have been as bizarre as asking from nothing, 'by the way, any chance the reason you aren't surprised by my turning a worgen suddenly is because you're married to one?' Can you even imagine?" Her tone is flippant, and she drinks more of her whiskey.
"I cannot," says Siamus with perfect, deadpan solemnity. "I am a man of very little imagination. I do expect the pair of ye will make a fine team. The other lady to whom I've extended an offer is Miss Janice Mattingly, the reporter. The one who wrote the piece about Northwatch for the Herald."
Natalyah's mood shifts as completely as a sudden gust of storm at sea might alter the waves from calm to a frenzy. "That was such a horrible story. Not horribly written, but the content," she clarifies.
But curiosity piques along her brows still lowered in anger and sorrow still fighting for supremacy over the rest of her face. "But why us? That seems like a career pivot. Does she want to write sins not tragedies?"
Siamus raises his eyebrows and contemplates the turn of phrase. "I — well, I suppose ye could put it that way. She wants out of the military, off the front lines, and she can hardly be blamed for it after all she went through. As a journalist, though, she's a keen observer and knows how to ask sharp questions. I think she'll be an asset."
"Well, and it certainly won't be boring, that's a given with that sort of line up, and with all these angles to pursue something, you might feel a little sorry for the poor cornered little mysteries," Natalyah says, tossing back her whiskey with an electric sort of amusement.
She launches back upright, spinning a little in her chair, as a levitate sets her back on her foot, metaphorically, her velvet brown eyes all dancing energy from the thought. "It almost sounds like it might be the start of a joke, doesn't it? A warlock, a worgen, a demon hunter, and a journalist walk into a detective agency…"
"It's too long," Siamus advises her with a gleam of amusement. "Rule of three. A warlock, a worgen, and a journalist, while a demon hunter stands discreetly in the background.
"And as I've already been over with Mrs. Hazan, your rent of the space until mid-November is five silver a month, after which point it will move to market rate. It's Mrs. Hazan's name on the lease at present, but I can have my assistant send you a copy to make the tenancy joint. We — Fallon, as landlords, that is — have property insurance but ye'll want your own professional indemnity, I imagine."
Natalyah does not do a good job of passing off that she knows what any of that means, and the lack of familiarity with things like having a job or a business lease causes a flush that brings out her freckles in sharper relief.
"Will I then?" she asks rhetorically with a tartness as if Siamus had accused her of not knowing things (that, to be clear, she didn't). "Will I also want to be sure to wear clothes, and wash my face?"
"I imagine so, aye," says Siamus with easy good humor, "but I wouldn't presume to instruct ye in your personal business, and I beg your pardon if I presumed too far in the professional. I had the same conversation with Mrs. Hazan, as she's not had much experience managing an enterprise of this nature, and so I thought it best to make sure ye have the same page, as it were."
"Even if we didn't know, it seems like the sort of thing that someone capable of handling a detecting agency could be trusted to research on her own, wouldn't you say?" Natalyah says, more of that bite to her words, reading into a simple helpfulness a criticism of helpless ladies. Somewhere out there, Lathrik heaves a sympathetic sigh probably.
"Of course," Siamus agrees affably. The eyerolling is all on the inside. "I'll beg your pardon again."
Natalyah gives him a baleful look as if she can sense the eyeroll, but tosses her head, her hair floating eerily around her like a dark halo with the movement, as she sets her whiskey cup down hard.
"So then assuming we aren't just here to look pretty in a building paying money to rent it, you must have an actual task in mind," she says, as if daring him to say otherwise.
"The task I had in mind was only to organize the agency. The business is entirely at your discretion, and I assume ye'll have no difficulties in finding cases or clientele, considering ye're the first such reputable agency in the city. I do have a case of my own, as it happens, with which I was hoping ye might assist. There's no urgency on the business — a peculiar personal matter — so it needn't preoccupy valuable time, but I'd be obliged to ye." Siamus watches her mildly. He looks a little like he's wondering whether he should have come armored.
Natalyah scoffs. "Really? You honestly think I'm going to put some random stranger's mystery over yours? You're my friend, I'm not going to table it off like it isn't important, no matter how not urgent it may or may not be," she says, aiming a very pointed finger at him. "Tell me what it is. I promise I'll do whatever it is I can do about it." She makes the promise without even hearing about it, which might be just who she is.
There is a moment's pause — recalibrating — when she switches to being cross that he did not assume she would prioritize his requests. Then he nods again. It's Miss Kensington-Whit, let's just roll with it.
"Last year," Siamus says, "a map was delivered to my home while I was asea in Vashj'ir." He turns away and crosses to the closed door of one of the offices to let himself in. (Sorry, Mayellen.) When he emerges, he is carrying a rolled scroll of parchment. He spreads it on the desk for Natalyah to see. She may or may not be familiar with the general shape of the region she is looking at. The map is elegant, hand-drawn and minutely-detailed; it is marked in a precise copperplate penmanship with numbers for terrestrial elevations and coastal depths, and no other writing whatsoever save for a tiny x across one jagged river.
Natalyah leans over the map on the desk, levitating in mid-air as if on some invisible surface, perusing it for something of obvious unknown mystery.
It's a map.
When nothing jumps out at her, she raises a brow at Siamus. "Well? And? What was strange about that?"
"It's a map of Kul Tiras," Siamus says. "Except that it's different. Kul Tiras cut all contact with the Alliance after the Wrathgate. It's gone silent; ye can't even get a letter home. Or from home. Not even Ta can, and Ta has… she's connected with people. Or was.
"But a few months after the Cataclysm, this map turns up at the house anonymously, addressed only to 'Stormwind Fallon.' That in itself suggests the sender is someone from the isle, because only a Kul Tiran would distinguish between the Stormwind and Stormsong Fallons. And the map, as I said, is different. Not Kul Tiras as I know it. Knew it." He traces a finger along one rough coastline. "I am assuming that it's a map of the isle in the aftermath. And I am assuming that this" — he touches the little x — "is specifically addressed to me. As that's where our grandparents' land is. Or was." He looks up at Natalyah. "But how anyone from the isle got it through to us, I can't tell ye, or whether it's a mainlander who's somehow still in contact with the isle, or any of it. For all I know it could be an incredibly elaborate prank. But if there's someone — some manner of contact with our homeland, or someone who has one, I'd bloody well like to know it. And who they are that went to the trouble of sending it to me, and what they mean by it."
Natalyah frowns as she listens, studying the little x as he points it out, and very likely readjusting her understanding of Kul Tiras being Silent and Inaccessible.
Between one blink and the next, she's a worgen. She leans in so close to the map that she's barely an eyelash length away, and inhales deeply at the x. She doesn't stop there though, as she sniffs all around the map like she's a strange new gnomish vacuum that sucks up scents.
Siamus watches with interest. Mrs. Hazan did not perform this particular inspection.
The map has passed through a number of hands and places; it smells most strongly at present of Fallon House and Siamus's office. Siamus has handled it, as have Shine and Miss Curran, and theirs are the clearest person-scents. There is a tang of salt soaked into the parchment — salt air or water — and the ink has a peculiar, distinctive smell, almost seaweedy.
Natalyah's sniffing follows strange pathways, as she traces the touches more and more into individual scents. Then she tries to pull up anything different from the parchment beyond the recent surface, but it's paper, not vellum, and whatever scents that might have been the mapmaker's are long gone.
There's a deep growl of frustration, as she raises her head up, a shimmer of iridescence heralding the return to human. "If I'd gotten to it on the delivery, I might have been able to tell you something about the maker of it, or at least have the scent to compare later, but it's been much too long. All I can get are the recent touches. That's the problem with paper.
"I can tell you that it smells like salt, more than just on the outside, like it's part of the paper itself, made with it maybe, and all around where the ink is there's a seaweed sort of smell, but not like Stranglekelp. Something else I haven't smelled before as a worgen," she reports.
Siamus nods slowly and folds his arms. "Miss Curran had the ink on the address card analyzed by an alchemist, because it was a unique color. The alchemist determined it was made with anchor weed, which is native to the isle and, as far as I know, only to the isle."
"That makes sense," Natalyah says, studying the map again. "For a prank or some sort of elaborate forgery though, what would someone gain by convincing you that this is real, if it wasn't? Was there something at your grandparents' land that would make you do something if you thought it was destroyed or whatever the x is meant to be? Have you done anything differently because of the map?"
"Apart from chase my own tail for a year, and send Shine and Miss Curran on snipe hunts? No, I can't say I have. And apart from the stable stock, the chief thing on my grandparents' land was my grandparents, and I can't say they’d be a loss I’d grieve." Siamus gazes down at the map. "There are others at the House who see differences in it and worry about their own people, of course."
"That doesn't sound like the most likely explanation then, even if we can't completely rule it out. After all, just because you didn't do what a prank was supposed to make you do doesn't mean it wasn't one. It just means they failed," Natalyah says. "Still, I think there's more reason to believe it's real and go from there until something doesn't fit well enough that would be better explained by someone having a go at you."
She hovers around the desk, looking at the map from another angle. "So if you want to find out who has contact with the islands… there's two possibilities. If this was a one-off, then it's going to be complicated to trace back no matter what, because it's not like we can catch them in the next act."
She holds up a finger in a classic but! gesture. "But, if that person is in regular contact with Kul Tiras, then they might have more things that they shouldn't, things that are scents from Kul Tiran sources. I can't just go sniffing everything randomly, but if we could narrow it down to possibilities, it wouldn't matter if the person would lie about access or not. The scents won't lie."
Siamus spreads his hands in a voila gesture, smiling broadly at her. "Brilliant. Very nice. For that ye may want to speak with Mrs. Hazan — I don't know whether she's developed a list of persons of interest yet or no, but she has begun looking into it as well. Between the pair of ye, I'd be surprised if we don't have an answer next week."
Natalyah narrows her eyes at Siamus. Is that a dare, Siamus Fallon?
"Where is Mrs. Hazan to be contacted?" she asks, and there's a sense that she's not asking for scheduling a visit in a few days so much as a few minutes from now.
"It's her office I got the map from a moment ago," Siamus tells her with a gesture at the door in question. "But at the present hour she's likely at home. She has an infant child."
Natalyah ruminates only briefly on this information. "When will she back in the office? Tomorrow?"
"Bright and early, I'd expect." Siamus smiles faintly.
Natalyah slaps a hand down on the table like she's put down a betting coin, an electric energy in her eyes. "Then so will I."
Game on.