(2025-07-26) Five Hundred! And Forty! Gold?

Details

Author:	Athena
Summary:	Natalyah sets off to investigate the K. Parrish of the mysterious maps, and to find out if the dark-haired 'Miss Fallon' is in fact Lady Sintha Fallon, only to discover that there's even more possibilities, and perhaps an avenue to follow the thread to a conclusion. 5k~ words.
Rating:	T for Teen

Arc: Apex Investigations

It's past the acceptable early afternoon visiting hours for a drop in visitation, but at least not the dinner hours for even the earliest of diners when Natalyah arrives at Sintha's townhouse door.

The lepidopterist is dressed in her version of casual clothes, a dark gray vest-shirt and a pair of sturdy jeans tied off at her left leg, her hair as wild as ever, but she wears also her jasmine, vanilla, and labdanum signature scent as a hint of another life when she could afford 5000 gold perfume bottles.

She travels by her dual canes rather than flotation or worgen, at least up to the door, where she casts Levitate, and stows her canes into a bag at her waist that absorbs them into their arcane space before knocking in an aristocratic tappity.

There is no immediate reply. The delay draws out: one one thousand, two one thousand… At nearly a full minute, the door opens, and Sintha Fallon is framed breathlessly on the threshold. She does not, it seems, have a butler.

She is dressed in combat boots, soft, loose-fitting black trousers, and a sleeveless black shirt; the tips of her fingers are stained black with either grease or ink. There is a smudge of the same black substance on her face.

She blinks, and then something in her posture shifts subtly, turns coquette: the outfit suddenly looks like a peculiar costume, incongruous on the beaming socialite. "Natalyah," she rhapsodizes. "Gosh, what a surprise! Did you need something? However did you come by this address?" Her laughter is bright and a little bit acid.

Natalyah seems briefly surprised at the outfit, though it doesn't last long.

"Your brother gave it to me, just a few hours ago," Natalyah answers directly. "Mayellen Hazan, Aszera Sunstrike, and I have begun a detective agency with Siamus' support, so we're investigating a map that he received where he doesn't know who sent it, how, or why. While looking into it, we've run into a bookseller mentioning another person using 'Miss Fallon' as a name, no first either given or not remembered, and you're the best person to know one way or another what's going on."

"Oh, the map." Sintha narrows her eyes and considers Natalyah for a moment. "All right," she decides. "Come in, then. Do you want coffee?" She turns around without waiting for an answer to stride away down the hall. "A bookseller mentioned a Miss Fallon? It certainly wasn't me, darling, I haven't read a book in years."

Natalyah floats ominously into the house, shutting the door behind her. "Oh, coffee, yes. If you have the Schooner's vanilla infused cream, you will gain my undying gratitude up to and including hiding a dead body levels. It's been so long since I've had it that I've started to think it was an imaginary friend I made up to make coffee better."

The hallway down which they proceed is papered in crisp pale blue pinstripes on white, above white wainscoting; the hardwood parquet is bare. None of the decor on the walls is art, precisely. It is all framed, but appears to include: Two patent application diagrams of what appear to be machine-parts, the certificates of patent framed separately beneath; a shadowbox containing miscellaneous dried flowers and some seashells; an age-yellowed edition of a newspaper called the Fleet Chronicle; and what look like random pages cut — or in some cases torn — from books and framed.

Sintha leads Natalyah to the end of the hallway and then turns right into a small, neat kitchen in crisp white and French Lordaeronian blue. There is a bar-height island at which two stools have been arranged.

"Of course I do," says Sintha. "It isn't Fallon House but it isn't the hinterlands either." (Unclear whether she means that in the figurative sense or she's talking about the actual place.) She washes and dries her hands, then sets a coffee press on the counter and begins to rifle cupboards. "Sorry, explain to me again what I have to do with a map and a bookstore?"

Natalyah floats to the kitchen, and releases the Levitate with a plop onto the barstool, leaning forward to prop her head up in one hand. She manages not to visibly drool.

"A secondhand bookstore by the name of Parson's, where someone traded him Kul Tiran goods for him to sell, which have ended up in the backroom after the kerfuffle with the Alliance. We were there to see if his 'old Kul Tiran stock' was actually old or cleverly disguised smuggling with the islands ongoing now to have access to secret stock. You know how nobles love exclusivity and shocking acquisitions to show off to certain crowds, so someone could really turn a hefty profit if they found a way to do it that wouldn't trigger alarm bells.

"But no, at least in this specific case all his books and things smelled right for having been there for a long while, nothing new. Among them though I was able to pick out the exact same scents of Siamus' map's paper and ink, and found some of your great-great-great whatevers Hywel Parrish's maps, and another by the name 'K. Parrish,' who we now think is the person who made Siamus' Mystery Map thanks to Scilla's examination of the brushstroke and things.

"When we asked about where some of the goods had come from, Mr. Parson, who is apparently allergic to first names, cited two sources: Captain Fairweather, and a 'Miss Fallon.' No first name — allergies — who he described as brown hair, brown eyes, didn't look 'fancy.' So, now we need to know if that was you in-unfancy-cognito, a Stormsong Fallon, or someone who used your family name to hide or bolster theirs," Natalyah lays out, spreading her other hand expansively over the kitchen counter.

Sintha turns on Natalyah so sharply that she leaves a swoosh of coffee grounds across the counter from the spoon in which she is holding a heap of them. "There is a secondhand bookstore here in Stormwind that had Hywel Parrish maps? More than one? Tides almighty." She stands contemplating this for a moment, then turns back to her coffee-preparation. "And he suggested he got them from a 'Miss Fallon'? Certainly not me. Shay would disown me."

She broods at the coffee press for a moment and then turns briskly to set a kettle of water on to boil. "Cousins Aoife and Aisling are both blonde. And Aoife and Roisin are both married, so neither would go around calling herself Miss Fallon anymore. And as far as I know, none of the three has ever had the least interest in visiting the mainland." She glances up. "And if any of them was dealing Hywel Parrish maps to a secondhand bookstore in Stormwind, we'd probably know it because they'd have turned up despondent on our doorstep after Uncle Deacon or Uncle Fion disowned them."

There is a pause while she surveys Natalyah narrow-eyed again; she doesn't seem to be actually looking at Natalyah. "K. Parrish, you said?"

Natalyah does her one better, as she digs into her bag and pulls out the bucolic countryside map and art combo itself, very carefully unrolling it with the sort of delicate touch of a person who learned how to pin butterflies.

"K. Parrish, King's Calendar 609," she says, nodding her head towards the signature, which sends the weird wobbling no gravity effect over her hair brushing around her tanned and freckled shoulders. "The whole 'disownment' thing isn't far off from one of our possible hypotheses, which is to test on the flip side of not a merchant and a middle-man, but on the assumptions if the person who got the Mystery Map here is somehow the same person who made it, who brought it over, and then that person either returned to Kul Tiras immediately or has stayed here, in hiding, this whole time since. And especially hiding from Siamus, who might have taken something badly about them being here or how, like for example selling important family maps for money to fund something."

"Oh!" says Sintha, her eyes going round. "It's Brennadam! Gosh." She leans over to study it more intently. "Gosh," she says again, quietly this time.

"Kian Parrish," she says at last. "We have a first cousin once removed named Kian Parrish. He's the son of Grandmother Fianna's brother Wyri, and a little younger than our father would be." She frowns at the map. "And this very much does not look like something Kian Parrish would dream up."

The kettle starts to hiss and Sintha turns to pluck it from the stove and pour boiling water into the coffee press. After another contemplative interval, she asks, "This bookseller — did he know the name Fallon? In connection with Shay or me, I mean? And did he know the value of the maps in question?"

"He seemed to possibly recognize Siamus' name when Mayellen mentioned him both by name as a 'House of Nobles Fallon' but he definitely didn't say anything like Vice Admiral or something Fallon, just repeated back 'the House of Nobles fellow.' Everyone we spoke to at the docks, any time Siamus came up, everyone knew him and no one called him 'House of Nobles' Siamus it was always a naval title, Captain, Admiral, whatever, Fallon. Parson had no reaction to your name really at all, but again, the first name allergy. He might think you all are Fallon Fallons," Natalyah quips tartly.

"And he let all three maps go for a grand total of 540 gold, although some of that is Mayellen knows how to bargain and haggle, but the way Siamus wrote about it and how you just looked, I get the feeling that's not what they could have gone for."

Sintha's hand jerks and she splashes boiling water over her other hand, which she's using to hold the coffee press. She swears and sets the kettle down with a bang, but her attention is all on Natalyah rather than her injured hand. "Five hundred? And forty? Gold? For two Hywel Parrish maps as well as that one? Tides almighty, Natalyah, I might have to send for your gentleman friend to inform him there's been a theft."

Natalyah, on the other hand (hehe), starts half forward at the injury, and there's a ping as a [Prayer of Mending] hits Sintha, followed by a gentle [Renew] — that's new.

"If you mean Lathrik, he's enlisted in the army, so he's not a guard anymore. Besides, Mr. Parson made Mayellen feel bad for not being a proper shopkeeper child like he is, so it's the tax," Natalyah says, half lemon tart defensiveness for Mayellen, and half distracted concern. "Did that get the whole of it for your hand? I still can't feel injuries fully very well without touching someone directly."

"In the army? Stars above, whatever for?" asks the young lady who enlisted with the 7th Legion not that long ago. She opens and closes her hand, flexing her fingers absently in what looks like wordless reply to Natalyah's question, then turns back to the coffee press. "An original Hywel Parrish ought to fetch upwards of eight hundred gold on its own. Why anyone would drop one in a secondhand bookshop on the mainland where it's unlikely the average person is aware of its value — "

Sintha stops talking abruptly and stares at the wall.

Natalyah meanwhile considers that as she gently rolls the map back up. "I suppose also it wasn't actually 540 gold for three maps, because there was a bonus poster for Mayellen thrown in. Something of a poster advertisement for…" She makes an annoyed sound as she pulls out her notebook and flips to a page to check the names.

"Anglepoint Wharf, now hiring apparently, or it was. And another one from an Ashvane Foundry with a slogan 'Ashvane Quality is Assured Quality.' Could that have anything to do with it? Would someone drop off something that valuable alongside those kinds of things to make the maps not seem especially valuable, or as part of a smash and grab? Or I don't know, does anyone use second hand bookshops like a very strange bank where they might tuck away something valuable in a safe place to come back to later and rebuy for cheap? Because that sounds risky if someone else buys the thing you're storing," Natalyah says, not pausing between her questions.

"Ashvane Foundry?" Sintha snaps out of her reverie to boggle at Natalyah.

"That's what it said, so I wrote it down just in case. They were only advertisements and didn't smell like the map, so I didn't buy the other or think it was especially important. Mayellen got the wharf one. Why? Does that mean something?" Natalyah asks with open curiosity, as she jots down a few notes in her book, misspelling just about every single name Sintha has mentioned so far going by heard rather than read.

"Ashvane is also family of ours. The Ashvanes." Frowning, Sintha takes down two coffee cups from a cupboard. "Would you say the bookseller specialized in Kul Tiran goods? Did he suggest he had? Before the… silence?"

"No, not this Parson for sure," Natalyah says as she flips through her notebook. "His father, Parson — no first name — started the collection, and Parson Junior said that after the shop passed to him, the same captains and travelers kept selling to him as they had his father. He mentioned there was a bit of a surge of interest after the Second War that probably made it appealing to acquire things. It took Mayellen some time to even track down Parson having Kul Tiran goods using a wide net of inquiry all around. If Parson's had been famous for selling Kul Tiran things, I'd expect she'd have mentioned it immediately."

Still frowning, Sintha pours the coffee. "It seems awfully odd to me that someone using our family name would be dealing items of particular interest to our family to an obscure Stormwind merchant. Items of, in some cases, substantial value even outside of our family. But if that's the meaningful connection, and we assume the three maps are from the same person as the Ashvane advertisement, it doesn't explain Anglepoint Wharf one unless that was sold by someone entirely different, or is a red herr—" Sintha goes still again, and then laughs gaily. "A red herring." She sets a cup of coffee before Natalyah. "It's a fish-packing district, you see."

She turns away to collect the vanilla-infused cream and a jar of sugar cubes as well as two tiny spoons. Everything is funner with a tiny spoon.

Natalyah's own wicked laugh rings out. "Oh, that's delightful," she enthuses and then promptly escalates it even further. "Can you imagine if someone really did this deliberately, setting up a game or treasure hunt, that someone missed playing until now?"

Sintha shakes her head, wryly amused. "A bit mad, playing a game like that with such valuable pieces, when the other party doesn't know there is a game, isn't it?" She begins to drop sugar cubes into her coffee. She does not stop during the span of this entire emote, including what follows.

"Because the maps — they are valuable. On the open market, as I said, but to our family — gosh. I can't think why someone who collected items like them himself would sell any off to a place like a secondhand bookshop, and I can't imagine that anyone who had family possession of one would dare. I suppose it could have been the child of a collector who inherited the things and didn't know… but why give the name Fallon, then?"

"Maybe it wasn't to someone who doesn't know the game but does know the thing, a way to smuggle money to the person. You know, sell it cheaply to someone who doesn't know what they have, the other person — a lover maybe or part a smuggling con — comes in, buys the maps for pittance, and then turns around and sells it for thousands, and then that other person never showed up for some reason," Natalyah speculates wildly, as she picks up her coffee and inhales it in a way that might be a few shades into the erotic.

She doesn't drink it though because she says, "Wait, you said this would be something terrible to your family back at home, right? What if this was a frame job. Someone who definitely isn't a Fallon who wanted it to be traced back to your family having sold these maps to obliterate their reputation, or make it look like your family was doing the smuggling scheme? Someone who was supposed to come in, see the maps and say these are valuable! who sold this to you! and the bookseller with zero descriptive ability and an allergy to first names says, 'Miss Fallon,' and conclusions get drawn?"

Sintha, who has by this emote stopped dropping sugar cubes into her coffee, frowns thoughtfully as she stirs. "I can see," she says at last, "someone from Kul Tiras wanting to perhaps set us up somehow, but it does seem a bit… baroque as such things go."

Somewhere else in Azeroth, Isla can see a 200k three part trilogy fanfiction of the tragic Kul Tiran smuggler woman and her beloved map buyer lover who perished before the delivery, and the smuggler returned to the Fallon House — because she was servant there, you see — and then slowly faded away by grief and that is why actually the library is also haunted.

Natalyah, however, drinks her coffee like its her map buyer lover. Don't worry, Lathrik, she'll come home to you, she just needs a moment. The sound she makes at the taste is not entirely appropriate for Social Settings, but squeaks in under the wire for Private Kitchen levels.

"So, now what? How do we find out who 'Miss Fallon' was?" she asks, her expression at odds between sharply curious and dreamy.

Sintha sips her coffee syrup and drops her gaze to the painted map again. She reaches out with her free hand as if to stroke it with her fingertips, but does not actually touch it. Her expression is briefly wistful.

Then she looks up at Natalyah. "Well, Shay and I both know perfectly well who Hywel Parrish is. As I am assuming that 'K. Parrish' isn't Kian, one must naturally wonder who they are. And I should add that just because this person isn't Kian Parrish does not mean they aren't in fact a K. Parrish. I couldn't possibly keep track of all that side of the family, there are absolutely millions of them." Sintha rolls her eyes and glances down at the map again. "But this person is intimately familiar with Stormsong. It could be a Kul Tiran cartographer using a pseudonym to trade on the Parrish family name, but…"

She shrugs. "If we knew more about K. Parrish, the ultimate source of the thing, then we might be able to work its course from there, determine the how and why, learn who 'Miss Fallon' is. It could be that 'Miss Fallon' herself is a red herring." Sintha scrunches her nose.

"For what it's worth, all three maps smell so similar that I don't think it's likely any of them are an outside source forgery, unless that person managed to get very close to the family to learn all their techniques, which we can't entirely rule out," Natalyah admits. It probably takes some amount of willpower to not lap at her coffee, but she fails in sipping at it in a genteel manner, choosing instead to gulp it down in large swallows. Mmm.

"We could try putting out a direct ask, maybe. Mayellen's been asking for Kul Tiran goods general, but we could try seeing if any K. Parrish maps ended up somewhere. Or if anyone's done business with a 'Miss Fallon' in the past few years. As far as alias goes though, I can't imagine that someone would choose it to try to fly under the radar."

Sintha purses her lips. "And all this 'Parson' had to say of our Miss Fallon was brown hair, brown eyes, not fancy, whatever that means? No mention of her height, her build, what she wore, anything of that nature?"

"Honestly, Sintha, I asked him a simple question to determine if he remembered her brown eyes as golden-brown perhaps, and he said 'brown's brown,'" Natalyah relates with all the put upon exasperation of a noblewoman who can't believe service people don't memorize ladies coming into their shops.

Sintha raises her eyebrows and reflects on it. "I suppose," she said, "he could have meant… you know, not golden-brown. Just… ordinary brown." Gosh, imagine having ordinary brown eyes like a peasant or something. "But then again, he was a man, so for all we know they could actually have been emerald green or something."

"Oh, I didn't even think of that," Natalyah says with a groan, drinking off the rest of her coffee like it's a tiny treat to fortify her for the thought. "We've been assuming he remembered 'Miss Fallon' correctly. She could very well have been blonde haired and fit one of the others like Eva and Ashlin after all."

Sintha nods. Eva and Ashlin Fallon, yes. "So it might be worth checking whether anyone else has encountered a 'Miss Fallon' besides myself. I wonder if — hm. To approach it — we could put it about that someone has been impersonating a Fallon, and offer a modest reward for information, which might both get information and put pressure on this Miss Fallon. But then again, if it only drives her into hiding…."

"She probably already is if she's been doing something odd around here for who knows how long. And it's not as difficult finding people as it once might have been. As a matter of fact, if she did go into hiding, if we could find where she's been living, or something of hers, I could probably follow enough of the scent to other places she's gone, and it might put us on her track. Or stake out places she's gone watching through other eyes. And if she's here as someone who was caught on the wrong side of — what did you call it? The Silence? Then maybe I could try getting a message through to her. It's not like I don't know what that is like," Natalyah says with a strange blend of compassion and suspicion, and then sets down her coffee cup.

"And then there's Mayellen. She can do a sort of blood magic that can prove family relationships. She can tell you if someone's blood is related to another one or not, which means we have the ability to say that we can prove if someone's not a Fallon."

"Fascinating," muses Sintha. She taps a fingernail on the side of her coffee cup meditatively. "What an unusually talented group of ladies. I suppose it's too late to catch her scent from something she sold the bookseller. One of these." She plucks at the corner of the map gently. "Or — you said you were able to pick out a distinctive scent from the Parrish maps themselves. Could you search for that or is it too much a needle/haystack situation?"

"Something like that, and a proximity thing. If I'm right up against the map, I can smell it and tell you if another one has the same scent of the paper and ink, but otherwise it's like asking if I can see this cup: the answer is yes, but not from anywhere in the house, let alone the city." Natalyah taps her mug helpfully. "But I found these two scrolls among several dozen books, even before I knew they were maps. If you get me into a room, I could tell, even if they were disguised as something else or magically invisible."

"And I have no idea how we'd do that without some inkling about this Miss Fallon. We can't very well get you into every room in the city." Sintha taps her fingernail again and then picks up her cup to sip sugar coffee. "I suppose we might — sorry, you might, I'm hardly an investigator — come at the thing from both sides. Look for Miss Fallon and for K. Parrish, or information about same, and find the point at which they connect. I assume it's by blood relation, but that's only if Miss Fallon is in fact a Fallon and K. Parrish is in fact a Parrish." She makes a moue, her gaze distant. "I wonder if Annai has a proper genealogy stashed somewhere."

"Who is Annai?"

Sintha blinks. "Miss Curran," she says, as though everyone in the city — nay, the kingdom — knows this. "Shay's assistant?"

Natalyah does have to think about it, but that name obviously rings a bell. "Oh, her. Well, the state of my life is now that I know what a person smells like well enough to pick her out of a line up before I know her first name. Although she does look like her own parents call her 'Miss Curran,'" Natalyah observes. "I like her."

"She is very likeable," Sintha agrees (a description that might startle Miss Curran herself). "And eminently competent, and I am quite sure she knows more about Shay at this point than he does. I know she was working on this business herself for a while, but I don't think she came up with this much, so now that you have names — or pseudonyms? — perhaps she has some way of confirming them?"

"Then it sounds like she's our next stop." Natalyah looks longingly towards the French Press like she's about to say goodbye to a beloved, but she does slide off the stool into a float. "It's probably time we compared notes anyway, just in case she knows something that was left out somewhere because it didn't seem important at the time, but now fits into place. And she can't be blamed for not finding what we have, since she had to have been looking at it differently at first. We only know it's a deeper mystery now because all the usual regular ways to trace an item back to its source failed. Her initial legwork is an invaluable part of all this," she says in that defensive tone as if Sintha had criticized Miss Curran for not knowing more (Sintha did not).

"Well naturally she's brilliant. Here, let me give you her address." Sintha rummages in a drawer and pulls out someone's calling card. It is very old, the cardstock softened and beginning to fuzz with age; at some point it apparently belonged to a L rd R k m. That's what's left of him, anyway.

Sintha turns poor L rd R k m over and scrawls an address in pencil on the back. She offers it out to Natalyah.

Natalyah takes the time that Sintha writes to pack up the K. Parrish map. She accepts the card and spares only a glance at poor L rd R k m's side before reading the address she actually cares about.

"Thank you for your help. It's been very useful," Natalyah says and starts to head out to leave, and then a thought clearly occurs to her, something that makes her chew on a part of her lip briefly. The slight toss of her head reveals she's trying to keep some sort of defense against feelings up.

"I'm sure you've heard that Lathrik and I bought Lucy's old house. She left a lot of half-finished… thoughts of inventions around. Neither Scilla or I could get rid of them, so they're just in storage upstairs at the moment, but if you ever wanted to — " A surge of tears make her blink, looking anywhere but Sintha, and her hands close into tight fists. "Try to finish the thoughts, to see if you can follow what she was trying to —"

Emotion briefly chokes her, and black fur flickers over her hands. "Well, you'd be welcome at the house any time. The house is not all as it was," she adds defensively. "It's not a museum to Lucy or anything. But she's not gone, either."

"Oh." Sintha stands very still a moment, the fingertips of one hand resting lightly on the counter, her gaze fixed on Natalyah. She blinks and glances past Natalyah down the hallway, her mouth twisted a little oddly. One of her fingertips taps the countertop like a tic.

Then she is all motion again. "Oh, gosh, darling. I'd be happy to. I would love that, honestly. Lucy was… positively brilliant. It would be a delight to see a little of her light kept burning." She smiles. Her sincerity is hard to read, which means it may be sincere because usually her insincerity is obvious. "You must tell me when a convenient time would be."

Natalyah's fists stay tightly closed for several long seconds until she finally releases the grip, the sense of black fur fading as she gains better control, and looks at Sintah again.

"I won't be around during the day until this whole map thing is solved. We're still trying to get it done in the time Siamus dared us to of a week, and even if we can't, I'm not stopping until it's solved," Natalyah informs her. Knowing Natalyah, and Siamus himself, it's likely obvious that Siamus simply said something, and Natalyah interpreted it as a dare, because of course she did. "I don't know what will be a regular day after, but I'm always home an hour or two before dinner and through it, especially while Lathrik is still here. And I won't mind company around after the army sends him somewhere else again."

The thought dampens her, a stormy cloud of awareness of a future when the soldier will ship out again, and she covers it poorly. She musters a brittle smile and does a Society finger wiggle wave. "I'll see myself out," she says, not unexpected given her notorious insistence on self-sufficiency.

Sintha follows her toward the door anyway. "Shay dared you to? In a week? Tides below, he's such an absolute jellyfish sometimes." Even if Sintha suspects her brother did not actually dare anyone to do anything, she is more than happy to reinforce the impression that he did. All the better to advance her Shay Is A Jellyfish agenda.

"He says he'll be happy about it no matter what timeframe we manage, as if we couldn't possibly actually have it done in a week, and so he has to already cushion the blow," Natalyah escalates. "But we still have until Tuesday of next week, and he can't stop us."

Probably nothing can, to be honest. This is a boulder in freefall off a mountain, and woe betide the mystery waiting at the bottom.

Sintha snorts. "Ugh, Shay," she says. "Well I hope you will quite show him up." She nods firmly.

Natalyah smiles evilly, clearly having missed her calling as a supervillain, as she opens the door herself and goes to show up Siamus.