A Rafael Interlude

The small dormitory of guest rooms were not the worst places Rafael had ever slept in. As a matter of fact, they equaled or exceeded the quality of the Ministry's in-building dormitory, which had been made with nobles in mind, albeit nobles without enough money to find their own residence near enough to the Ministry to be able to reach it regularly. The furnishings were plain but well-made and comfortable, and if there weren't extra things like sittings rooms, well, it was a dormitory.

Having Sora as a roommate once more… well, it wasn't utterly terrible. They got along well enough at work, and now that they haven't lived together for some months, knowing they'll only have to put up with each other for a few weeks made for an amicable living arrangement. And while he didn't have lasciel with him, the dormitory came with laundry service from the castle, so that wasn't something he had to worry about. As long as they kept the room reasonably tidy, the occasional servant coming in to clean was able to take care of the rest.

Unfortunately, they weren't the only ones in the dormitory, and while the Magic Tool Department all got along fairly well with each other and most of the other departments—save one or two who were still disgruntled at having to do their own work again—the same could not be said for the other departments of the Ministry. In the halls of the Ministry itself, it had been limited to burning glares, pointed comments and cutting memos. Here at the castle, however…

"That funding should have been ours, and you know it!"

"Well, if you'd written a better proposal instead of the garbage you did come up with, YOU STILL WOULDN'T HAVE GOTTEN IT!"

"—keep telling you to not let that little pygmy lose outside of your department!"

"I have more important things to do than—"

… in hindsight, it was no wonder the Ministry was not located in the capital. Rafael would well imagine the nonsense people would have gotten up to if they'd been allowed within easy yelling distance of any other branch of government. Historically, purges had been caused by far less annoying things, like purges and undead.

Still, the early morning yelling made for a convenient alarm to make him wake, since he no longer had his fiancée to do so. Very unfortunate, as Maria was much more pleasant to wake up to than angry yelling, even if she immediately made him want to go back to sleep again.

"Hex it, do they have to be so loud?" Sora grumbled, glaring in the general direction the noise was coming from. The other man had been up later than Rafael, since with the arrival of dignitaries and noble hangers-on from abroad, he'd begun putting his 'pretending to be a servant' routine to work so he could keep an eye out for potential dark magic and dirty dealings in general.

"You know the answer to that question is always 'yes'," Rafael said, getting up and stretching to get the kinks out. "Come on, the faster we're done, the sooner we're too far to hear them."

Sora grumbled as Rafael poured water into the wash basin to clean his face. "I'm pretending ot be a servant, why do I need to attend the lectures too?"

"Ministry policy. When you're head of the ministry someday, you can change it, but until them, it's lectures for the rest of the week."

"Sometimes I miss working for criminals," Sora sighed. "Never had to go to lectures then."

"Oh, man up, it's not going to kill you. If it was they'd have us dipping our heads in wax before the lectures."

Sora made a face. "I hate those shelves. Hex the library for having them."

They quickly washed and got dressed, Rafael in Ministry robes, Sora in servant's clothes under his Ministry robes, before going to the room next to theirs.

"Brad, it's us. Can we come in?" Rafael said after knocking, ignoring the yell of '—well, you mother—' coming from upstairs.

The door opened, and Chad Braddington greeted them with a smile, one arm already holding weights and lifting it up and down in curls. "Hey director, Sora," he said.

"Hey Brad," Rafael nodded. "We're here to let Director Hart off his chain so he can go to the bathroom and get dressed."

Chad snapped his fingers. "Oh, right, I was wondering why I was alone in a room with two beds. Sure, come in."

It was terrible, really. If it weren't for his tendency to get lost in a perfectly straight corridor, occasionally be ignored completely by everyone around him, and being really absentminded and wandering off, Nathan Hart would have been a wonderful member of the Ministry. He was hard working, tidy, thorough, pleasant to be around, a perfect gentleman, and had an amusing selection of embarrassing stories acquired over years of… well, people forgetting he was in the room. Unfortunately, over the years he'd been heartlessly passed around from department to department who couldn't deal with the fact they occasionally lost track of him, he occasionally lost track of himself, and he had more than once unknowingly been in a room that two or more people had decided to have a physical alliance in.

Well, he was part of the Magic Tool Laboratory, and for all that Larna Smith had had many, many, many, many, many, many, MANY failings as a department director, not taking care of her subordinates hadn't been one of them, unless it was her running off to do her own thing and leaving her paperwork to them. It was a tradition they were perfectly happy to continue, and which the other departments callously supported by continually trying to foist the so-called 'rejects' off on them.

They went in and locked the door behind them with Chad leaning on it so it couldn't open accidentally. It took a while, but they finally noticed Nathan sitting patiently on his bed, shirt, vest, coat and Ministry robe in place and waiting for them to unlock the soft and padded manacle around his ankle. The manacle was actually a magic tool, strange as it was, whose purpose was to undo itself in the presence of fire or water, meaning they didn't have to worry about Nathan getting caught in a flood or burning building.

When the manacle came off, Sora and Rafael stood there holding the back of his ministry robe and talking to Chad and Nathan as the latter put on trousers, socks and shoes. Sora, with more experience as a servant, helped Nathan get washed, while Rafael pointedly reminded Chad to put something on the sleeveless exercise shirt he preferred, which was done grudgingly. Chad also had to leave the barbell, having to make do with the little sack full of lead balls that, if you didn't know any better, one would think was a sack of beans or something.

Rafael inspected his department critically before nodding. "All right, let's go," he said. Keeping Nathan between them and making sure they had a grip on his robes, they left the dormitory room, passing through the morning arguments of other members of the ministry and a few people who were actually getting ready for the day. For people needing to stay together was slow going, but eventually they made it outside, where they found the other two members of the department waiting for them, talking casually about yesterday's.

"Good morning, ladies," Rafael greeted.

"Good morning, Shadow Director," Lisa Normal said through her hand puppet, even as her face smiled at them in greeting. Next to her, Sienna Nelson nodded in greeting, incongruously carrying a length of fine chain. One end was fastened to an elegant, almost bracelet-like manacle at one wrist, while the other was connected to an empty shackle.

It was the work of a moment for Sora to lock the shackle around Nathan's leg, adjusting it so that it was comfortable and handing the key to Rafael. That done, Sienna took her place next to Hart, ostensibly functioning as his secretary. The embarrassment from the first few days of being seen being literally chained to a man had subsided, and she wore a resigned, even amused look on her face that could be best interpreted as 'this is my life now'.

The chain clinking with every step, the group from the Magic Tool Department headed out for breakfast and another day's lectures. Rafael hoped he and Maria would be able to make some time together over the meal. If they were lucky, they'd even be able to sit together, or at lease close to it.

It was simply another ordinary day.

The day after the lecture on Tasmeria, they discussed Ethenell, which according to Professor Vaati had also recently undergone a war of succession and infighting, leading to the current king coming to power. Maria was starting to recognize a pattern here. Surely that couldn't be natural? First Sorcier itself, then La Sable, and now Ethenell… had something happened during the previous generation to have prompted so many violent changes of government, without resulting in the surrounding countries taking it as an opportunity to invade and annex land?

Well, not the previous generation. The war of succession in Ethenell had occurred well within Maria's lifetime, within the last seven years. The new king, King Faraam Dahl, named after the so-called Nameless King of myth, was still securing his rule, and had therefore sent his trusted half-brother, Prince Cezar, in his place to represent the country.

While not a desert, Ethenell was far south and very hot, much hotter than in Sorcier. A lot of land was devoted to the country's olive groves, and they exported a lot of oil to other nations. Because of where it was situated, fishing was an important industry there, which occasionally had them butting heads with Xiarmah over fishing rights and territorial waters, and was the primary reason both of them were in the Assembly: to prevent both countries from escalating to open naval warfare and disrupting the oil trade.

Even though Ethenell oil brought a lot of souls into the country, there was a sharp divide between the rich and poor, and there were massive slums where criminality, and slave trading flourished, at least before the current king had come to rule. Supposedly, he was trying to push for reforms to better the lot of those in the slums, but was being blocked by his own nobles, who saw the moves as threat to their wealth and power. However, the king had the army and a powerful core of knights on his side, and was working with Covenants to effect positive changes for the kingdom's poor…

"One of the reasons King Faraam is maintaining his power is how he has been treating Ethenell's undead tribes, who have traditionally dwelled in the areas too hot and lacking in water for those who have not attained undeath to live comfortably," Professor Vaati lectured. "Ethnell's undead, mostly composed of the skeletons of ancient warriors, fallen soldiers, and mercenaries native to the country who have journeyed back home to rest, control several very rich mines that provide the country with copper, tin, iron, lead and marble. His overtures and treatment of them, allowing undead to join Ethenell's governing council, has caused many undead to break their traditional political neutrality to tentatively side with him for the time being, bringing with them a source of riches and skilled and experienced laborers to grow those riches. Ethenell's catacomb district has risen to become a powerful mercantile hub in recent years, and their undead warriors are considered on par with knights. It is predicted that one of the primary points of contention in the coming Assembly is how Ethenell's prosperity will affect Etran's current trading agreements. Sources have heard that anti-undead sentiment is on the rise in Etran and La Sable as a result…"

At those words, Maria heard several derisive snorts at such old-fashioned ignorance being bandied about again. Humanity were undead, after all, most of them simply hadn't died yet. It was silly and long-disproven, but something that many smallminded people still espoused unironically.

The next day, the lecture on Etran continued on the topic of trade, since Etran was a major trading hub, visited by merchants from as far as Shirabad and Ababwa in the west. While a officially a federation of smaller states ruled by a council, in the last century the major prevailing power in the country were the major mercantile houses, who supposedly employed spies and saboteurs to give themselves the edge on each other. Whole towns were supposedly all but owned and controlled by this or that merchant house or company, with many of the merchantile houses having extensive private armies, ostensibly to defend their trading caravans against bandits.

"It is believed that true banditry has been all but wiped out in Etran, and anyone attempting to practice it without the tacit permission of the trading house or company in control of a given area are immediately dealt with. However, 'banditry' is a convenient fiction for launching small raids against each other's operations, so for the moment, Etran officially has an extensive bandit problem that requires the merchant houses and companies be allowed to maintain their extensive private armies. In recent years, the mercantile houses have been trying to expand their power into New Catarina, with little success. The current leading merchant house in the nation is the house of Argent Silver, which replaced the now-fallen houses of Doofenshmirtzand Winford-Louder…"

Through all these lectures, Maria of course kept an eye on her squire, but Katarina seemed able to keep up with the information from the lectures, and was very enthusiastic when it came to discussing them over dinner. The specific national etiquette of various countries, she had her usual trouble with, but their nightly drills were taking care of that.

And then, one afternoon, came the dance lessons.

Maria had been pleasantly surprised when she had learned this was in the schedule. Not only would they be learning the popular courtly dances of the other countries, but there was also a brief lesson on the ballroom dances of Sorcier. Maria had wondered why this would be the case. After all, most nobles would have been taught how to dance as part of their education. While a refresher for them—or in Maria's case, her first official lesson—would probably be necessary, in the case of some people who hadn't had an opportunity to dance in a while, there was, strictly speaking, really no need for it.

And then Maria saw the Third Prince waiting for them in the ballroom where the lesson was to be conducted and understood.

Of course. She should not have forgotten whose idea these lectures were.