ATTN: ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE. [seven-related!]

[mnemosyne]

Not merely cliaths and fosterns and the exiled and the lost but: some few kin. The word drifts, filters. Moves, mouth to ear and ear to mouth and back again. The building is closed. It matters little, Baranski & Greer maintains a satellite office, and the satellite is very specific to the very specific subset of Éva's criminal defense practice, and the more circuitous shadow practice that has her traveling some months twenty days out of thirty, to inauspicious locales in half-remembered places, where the law and the Law intersect with the unfortunate realities of Life as They Know It and her own first law is not to vigorously defend her client, but to protect the Veil.

But see,

here. A hotel suite, a conference room. It hardly matters.

Éva arrives late; later. Slips in through the door and circles the edgy crowd of young Garou. She is more than twice the age of the youngest cliaths, who are all more adult in the eyes of the Nation than she. By now, any sting that that awareness breeds in her is well-hidden behind her dark eyes. Actually, any sting is gone. What she feels, when she feels anything for them, strangers all, is a vague sense of compassion.

They are all so monstrously young.

--

She is: composed, dressed in a dark and formal business suit that is well-suited to the air conditioning and to hotel conference rooms and to marble-floored courtrooms and cheaply-paneled hearing rooms and also: to the sleek modern formality of contemporary jails but not at all to the heat outside.

There is a hint of perspiration at her temples. It is warm outside. She has not been sheltering in this motel. She made a choice, and chose to come here.

Someone else had to sort out her schedule.

--

Éva does not sit. She stands comfortable on the outskirts of whatever circle has formed in expensive leather heels that are more than two but not so much as three inches. More leather over her shoulder: a purse and a briefcase. This is like to be a long meeting, so she does lower the latter to the floor and rest it against the wall.

There is a hint of breeding to her. Just enough to confirm their first impression - that dark eyes and clear features and dark hair and that sort of remove and composure means: Shadow Lord. Perhaps some of the Fosterns know her as Andraj's mate. He's been dead for more than a year, and most of those in the room know him not-at-all.

--

"Have you perhaps considered," when she does speak, she does so evenly and well. Her voice is modulated, quiet enough that one has to <i>pay attention</i> to hear, precise enough that it cuts through the white noise of the room. " - asking, not where they are, but what they want. With an office building, at 1999 Broadway, in Denver, Colorado, which is something, but is not-a-Caern.

"They do not attack Forgotten Questions. They were chased away and have an entire continent on which to practice their depravities, but they came back here, and fixate, once more, on Cold Crescent.

"Which was not always," the most minute lilt of her dark brows, "ours. The Nation purchased the building in 2005. What was it - whatever it is, that singularity you have found - before that? Have they focused themselves with such exacting fury merely because it is a home for us in this city, or because they want it, want to take it back, because they dream of it, need it, wish to use it as some magnified focus and terrible focus to - "

There is something fierce there, and driving, and steady, and ferocious and then she pulls it back. Cuts it off.

A beat.

The smallest, sparest smile. Apology as much as anything else.

"I don't know. I don't see the world the way you do. But perhaps you should start looking for answers not out here," a lift of her chin, northeast, in the direction of 1999 Broadway. Specific enough to suggest that she is aware of her exact orientation in the nameless and faceless suite-or-conference room. "but in there.

"Perhaps it is wrong to try to puzzle out the motives of an unreasonable and and monstrous enemy. Perhaps the motives matter not a whit. Perhaps they are motive-less. I don't pretend to have anything to offer you except questions."

With that, she steps back. Cedes the floor, to whomever else might speak.