Summer Wind forgets her uneasy feeling as soon as Jonas and Smoke Cat return with her to the Arcane Academy. She must show them, in immense detail, why she loves the place. The shaman is more interested than the reformed trickster, but both are happy to view the tight security around the wand. #ArcaneAcademy#Pangaea
When she returns to the open greenswards of the Academy, then, she will clear her head by sitting quietly for a few moments, and then the shaman will dance. Hopefully, Summer Wind can be found and detached from her regularly scheduled lessons to learn something quite different. Smoke Cat Watching feels very strongly that the young girl is involved in this... wrongness... as well. Their own formidable magic should keep Silver Dagger from scrying them, but that is what this is reminiscent of.
That morning, while both her escorts are busy, Smoke Cat ventures into the city alone. She goes nowhere but places she has already visited numerous times, and her body language projects confidence, as she was shown. Still, though, there are so many people and they are all talking and yelling and shouting at once. She likes the cool white stone of the walls, or even the homlier mud brick, but they loom and constrict, and even imprison, in ways she was not concious of before. She buys nothing.
Another morning, Jonas and Summer Wind who also collaborated on the portal project, are summoned to discuss a breach in protocol, which might have resulted in the tiniest jeopardy to the secret at large. The shaman has a bad feeling about this "tiny chance", but as it fails to combine or associate itself with her overall bad feeling, of being watched?..., the new bride refocuses her mind on more joyful things. Maybe it's time she teach Summer Wind how important it is to dance, not just read.
Once, in the marketplace, a divan conveyed by a heavily curtained litter is carried by, and Smoke Cat Watching thinks she might have recognized the shapely expanse of leg so artfully revealed. Pretty Girl has a small, but distinctive, birthmark on the back of one heel. Still, it is no business of the shaman's what Pretty Girl has chosen to do with her life; after she was cleansed and punished, the nameless girl was free to make her own decisions, provided that she cause no further trouble.
Smoke Cat, oddly enough, seems to have contracted her sister's misgivings. It is more than just the change of environment, she believes. However, it is equally likely to be her knowledge of the proximity of the wand. She smiles, therefore, while her new husband and sister show her the tourist attractions, and some things worth seeing that most visitors never hear about, within the fabulous city. They take the shaman shopping together, and each alone, trying to coax her into making purchases.
