A Break in the Day

[Glenn]

"To one side, Jenkins." Truly, it was a strange mix of blatant rudeness and unsettling familiarity. At the very least, it was a mastery of routine details, but poor 'Jenkins' couldn't have known that. All he knew was that there was a young, well-dressed stranger with a cane forcibly navigating his way around the old cobbler. He was certainly a stranger. They'd never met. They'd never spoken. Oh, Jenkins had a fairly good idea who it was, but that made the familiarity all the worse. There was no reason that Glenn Burnie ought to have any idea who he was... but then Glenn really needed to know everything, didn't he.

Moreover, today he needed to get where he was going with haste. Granted, that was true of everyday. Time was the enemy. Time and nature and death. Damn the sun for setting before he was ready! It was just another thing that needed fixing in a world full of such things. Things. Nature. People. It was a never-ending quest, a crusade, and he wouldn't fail it. He dare not fail at it, and that meant that withered old laggards like Jenkins here had to move to one side!

Still, cane or no, Burnie was agile and graceful enough. Ariane had seen to that. The flowers in his other hand made things a bit awkward, especially since he had an urge to batter every slow person in his path with them, but restraint won out. He didn't even use the cane for that, though he did use it to hook an urchin or two out of his way.

Even with that affectation of a limp, he covered ground swiftly and was soon in front of one of a rather plain looking building that hosted one branch of the Myrken government. This particular wing of the government was not large enough to deserve its own building, likely, but Glenn had put its foot down. It was nepotism at its finest, save, of course, for the sheer competency of the young woman who had been tasked with running it.

With all the presumption that a man in his position deserved, Burnie opened the door without a knock and walked right on in. "Morning." He said with a snappy but honest smile to the bespectacled male clerk closest to the door, before brandishing the flowers dangerously in his direction. "... and no, these aren't for you so don't be getting any ideas now. Let Miss Olwak know that I'm here." He'd storm in on the lot of them, but never on her. Part of this endeavor was to bolster her confidence. The last thing he was going to do would be to undermine her in front of her staff.

[Jirai]

The poor man had been rather startled by Burnie's abrupt appearance, but did a good job of hiding it. It took only a few moments for him to leave through a door leading further back and then to return.

"Go on in, sir."

Beyond the door was the small room that Rhaena Olwak had converted into an office. It was scarcely large enough for a desk and a few chairs, but it suited her needs nicely. Several maps were hung on the walls and thick-bound record books lined a shelf, save for one that sat open on the desk, work abandoned as word of Glenn Burnie's arrival had been delivered to the Trader girl.

"Glenn!" She exclaimed with a smile, her scaled face unveiled. "I wasn't expecting you." Not that it was an unpleasant surprise though, not at all!

[Glenn]

He had insisted on putting together at least one of those maps for her. He would have spent all day making her maps if she thought them useful. He had also insisted that she have a bigger office. He went so far as to contrive kicking another department out of a larger building. She didn't seem to want that, however, and he bowed to her wishes. That was part of the point of all of this. He wanted her to have wishes again, to have opinions again, to be her own person.

Kals was a fool who didn't understand anyone who's mind he couldn't violate. Glenn knew something about it. He sympathized, truly. It was a crutch, a cheat. He spent so long with his bond to Rhaena. Knowing her thoughts then had been effortless. It was so much less rewarding than discovering them in more mundane ways, however. You appreciated things in life more when you had to work at them, and they had been working hard for the last few months, at EVERYTHING.

They had been working hard after a year of healing and repression and it had paid off, at least he felt it had. His smile was effortless, not that she ever saw him without a smile these days. He came through his ordeal a changed man. "I hope I'm not interrupting anything important. Well, obviously I am, and obviously it's important. Everything that you're working on here is important after all." He spoke as if he believed it and she had no reason to think otherwise. He probably did. "I COULD leave if you needed me to. The most important thing is to drop off the flowers. I've always held the belief that lovely things should be surrounded by other lovely things." He glanced about. "They're a counterbalance to all the paperwork at least, no?"

[Jirai]

"Oh, no! No need to leave. I should take a break anyway. The flowers are quite lovely." She had a vase or two around the room already, and pulled one out.

"I was down yesterday looking at the buildings the dragon damaged. We've made good progress on the repairs - I expect things should be well done before the snows come."

[Glenn]

"We're going to make real progress." All confidence, pure and simple. He should have come back from his ordeal broken, but he was stronger than ever now, or at least he seemed it. Yes, there was the limp but even that seemed to come and go occasionally. It was as if the only thing that was wounded in his time away was his doubt. "Oh, people have pulled together and rebuilt before, but they've never had guidance like this, guidance and support." And then he looked her straight on, straight in the eyes. She wasn't wearing her veil, but even if she was, he'd find some way to stare right through it. "Guidance and support, but most of all you. You're going to make this place amazing for them, Rhaena. The brunt of them may be smelly and illiterate, but they're the luckiest smelly, illiterate people on this continent to have you thinking about their concerns."