T - Harps, Lucca

[Lucca]

Colin noticed the time, but purposefully held off just a tiny bit longer...waiting to see if Dania or Joel would mention it. Of course, the silence seemed rather deafening, so after merely a minute or two Colin relented and stood up, stretching his wings a little. "Well! Excellent work, both of you. If you're both amenable, we'll end here for the day and go for our dinner." He paused, forcing a smile. He was on edge again, and he couldn't put a feather on why, exactly...

"You may choose to either eat in the main dining room, or in a private room with myself, or in the same room with only the two of you." After all, he trusted them enough by this point to leave them on their own if they wished it. Personally, he saw himself as wonderful and sophisticated company, but he could tell Dania was still a bit uncomfortable around him for some reason. It could just be her overall shyness, since the Cardinal hadn't seen her around anyone else other than himself and her young assistant.

Whatever their decision, he would lead them to the door and pull it open, gesturing them back out into the hall with a polite nod.

[Harpsdesire]

"That sounds fine. I think we accomplished quite a bit." Dania set down her quill and capped the bottle of ink she had been using. She flexed her paw a few times, for it had gotten somewhat cramped from holding the pen-- one more disadvantage of animal form. "I'm very pleased with your work, Joel." She told the boy, who beamed and thanked her. He was eager to please by nature, but he had also taken a bit of a liking to the rat, who was nice and fairly pretty, even if she was also sort of weird.

When Colin listed the options, Joel spoke up before Dania had a chance to speak. "Ooh! Main Dining room!" He exclaimed with considerable enthusiasm b oth for his choice and the meal itself. Dania was nice and all, and Colin wasn't too bad for an adult, but the teen would greatly prefer to dine with cards closer to his own age. Also, if he choose the main dining room, he thought there was a change he might see The Queen, and that would be pretty neat to tell his friends about. He failed to realize that the highest ranks occupants of the castle most likely had their own dining room, but even if he had he would have chosen the bustling main room over the tedium of an intimate dinner with Dania and Colin, who knew next to nothing about science.

It was not the choice she would have made, but Dania nodded to Colin that she was willing to go along with the boy's choice. He seemed quite excited about the idea, and her own discomfort with crowds was hardly a good reason to disappoint him after he had worked so hard on the library.

Maybe it would be a good thing, anyhow, as Joel would find someone else to talk to, relieving her of the burden of smalltalk. She just hoped that Colin would not be offended that her assistant had not preferred the cardinal's company over the larger group setting.

[Lucca]

Colin nodded, agreeing. It was more than he had actually hoped they'd accomplish on the first night, given how late in the day the two had arrived, and it helped to brighten his mood a little even as the thought of voluntarily returning to the tense halls of the Court tried to weigh it down. He also nodded at Joel's enthusiastic answer, allowing himself a small bubble of amusement he kept hidden. Still, it was a bit of a relief. The dining room was the one place where the Court still seemed almost normal. Though there was still an odd tenseness in some of the interactions there, a strange paranoia that was even starting to sink its claws in during such a harmless necessity. It was something Colin could brush off there, though, among the small talk and laughter and fine dining.

He took a few moments to tidy up everything and leave it in a state that would be easy to pick back up tomorrow as well as one that wouldn't scandalize the absent librarians if one of them ever did show their face. Once out in the hall, Colin led them down a few twisting corridors and grand staircases until they made their way back to the dining room that Dania had seen earlier. Colin released a quiet breath he didn't realize he'd been holding as the sounds of voices and laughter (however more strained it was than normal) could be heard from the slightly open door.

"Here we are. Please, enjoy this meal with the Court's goodwill," he intoned, but before he could open this door, a servant did it for him. He blinked, -almost- surprised, and noticed it was the same girl who had prepared Joel's room.

She bowed deeply to Colin, and a little more shallowly to the guests. "Hello, Your Excellency Colin and his most esteemed guests. Please, come in and be seated. The meal will be served momentarily." She bowed them to the door, and Colin thanked her quietly and went to take his seat. The upper nobility usually did not dine here, though some of the Jacks did, when they weren't eating with their superiors or in their private quarters.

The smells wafting from the kitchen next door were already mouth-watering.

[Harpsdesire]

Although they didn't feel the air of paranoia and strangeness as acutely as Colin, both Dania and Joel had a sudden sense of increased warmth and comfort as they entered the large dining room. The air was fragrant with a variety of food, and at least some of the cards within seemed to be in good moods, since laughter and chatter filled the air. Dania thanked Colin and nodded her head uncomfortably to the servant who bowed and held the door, quite unaccustomed to that level of deference.

Joel had stepped a little ahead of Dania and Colin to seek out a place at the long table. A cursory look was enough to confirm that none of the kings or queens were dining at the communal tables, although he did see a few Jacks, probably not all titled with the court. An assortment of secretaries, guards and other residents of the palace completed the colorful scene. Many realms were represented, including a few corvies. He was glad for his black spade marking, as Dania was greatly in the minority with her bright red suit symbol.

[Lucca]

Colin sat down next to a few of the upper level servants and one other Jack he recognized, trusting that his guests could fend for themselves at dinner, and that his brightly-colored feathers made him easily findable if they needed him. Dinner was a blur of good conversation and better food, and though it would generally be the other way around, the Cardinal didn't let it bother him. He snuck a few glances at Dania and Joel throughout, and found the results of these checks much as he would have expected.

After the meal was over and all courses had been served, Colin took his leave of his dinner companions and went to stand outside the door and wait for the guests to emerge. After all, he had promised to show them to their rooms, after which he would retire to his own and at least attempt to get a little rest. A good night's sleep was becoming harder to come by, though, and he may have resorted to something drastic like drugging his own tea if he wasn't so completely against it on principle.

When he saw the familiar flash of green, and the purple, oddly-gaited form behind, he smiled and gestured them over with a wing. "I trust you both enjoyed dinner?" he asked briskly, fluffing up and then settling his feathers to make sure they were laying flat. "Please, allow me to escort you to your rooms...unless you wish some other sort of entertainment this eve?"

[Nathalia]

((When they awake the next morning, they will find that everyone in the Palace is gone, vanished completely with exception to a very confused Mia (whom you may ask Greenie to play if you wish, or just RP as him shutting himself in his room from fright and not coming out) and the comatose form of the Solandrian daughter of Bernard, Raina.
No one else is present, all have gone and the Palace is humming with magic from unseen sources...
It feels oddly malevolent.
If any of them try to leave the grounds, they will feel faint before they get a mile and then pass out, re-awakening in the library.
Odd voices begin prowling the hallways after dark, and things in the library begin to move about when no one is looking.
Can anything be done to stop this?

Search the library once the characters have reacted to the new turn of events. As you search it creatively, the Admin may drop clues...or something more...to your plights.))


~Nathalia

[Harpsdesire]

((I think based on the fact that Dania just wants to sleep, and what Nat said, time skip to the next morning!))

When Dania woke the next morning, it was to an oddly silent castle. At first, she thought it might still be to early for others to be stirring, and contemplated going back to sleep. A glance at the the clock on the guest room wall conformed otherwise, as did the thin but string shafts of sunlight slipping through the cracks around the heavy velvet drapes. Maybe everyone else was at breakfast?

Dania got out of bed, brushed her teeth and otherwise made ready for the day, then knocked on Joel's door. She heard footsteps, then the door opened a nervous crack. Joel looked out at her, then smiled sheepishly and flung the door open the rest of the way. "Oh, hi! Goodmorning! Did you sleep ok? I slept ok." He seemed a little too cheerful for a teenager before breakfast time, so Dania gave him a questioning "Good morning...?"

It seemed that was all the encouragement Joel needed to talk. "So... there's like nobody here all of a sudden. No breakfast, nobody working in the garden, no gaurds..." Joel related the story of how he woke a bit early and decided to make his way down to the dining room to see if he could get some early breakfast, since he was up anyway. He had gotten slightly lost, but eventually made him way to the dining hall, only to find it deserted. Thoroughly creeped out, he had run back and locked himself in his room for the past half hour or so.

The fur on the back of Dania's neck prickled. The foreboding and heavy paranoia from the day before had been replaced by a faint but persistent buzz of magic in the air that niggled at her consciousness and made her feel tense and jumpy. "Well..." This was a development Dania wasn't really sure how to deal with. She decided that the best course of action was to head back to the dining hall, where Colin would surely be going to get his own morning meal and meet up with them to get back to the library. "Let's go see if we can find something to eat, anyway, and meet up with Colin."

Maybe the clocks were wrong, and it was earlier than Joel had thought, and he had been too early to meet up with anyone in the halls or dining room. She was grasping at straws, but it just didn't make sense for a whole palace to empty out overnight. There had to be someone here somewhere!

When they reached the large room, the tables were still empty, and no smells of food came from the silent kitchen. Joel looked half disappointed and half terrified. Dania had to take a deep breath to quell her rising panic. This was just so... wierd...

[Lucca]

There was no way around it. Something was very, VERY wrong and Colin was terrified. At first, as he'd suspected, he'd had quite a bit of trouble sleeping. But after hours of tossing and turning, he finally managed to drift off...only to awaken what felt like mere moments later (but was really, he knew from the clock, several hours) and gave up on sleep completely.

It was still a little bit before dawn, so at first the empty halls didn't really bother him. The Cardinal had walked to the kitchen to perhaps get a cup of cocoa to calm his nerves. He'd found it a little odd that the kitchen was...totally deserted. Usually there would be at least a few cooks, if not half the kitchen staff, up preparing breakfast. He tried to push it out of him mind, but after wandering out to the gardens and also seeing...no one...no one in the halls, no one in the kitchen...he started to get a little panicky and began knocking on the doors to the servants' quarters...and there was simply no one there.

Not to mention the air, now that he noticed it, felt odd and heavy and evil. He couldn't rightly say how air managed to feel evil, but it somehow managed and he didn't like it. In desperation, Colin had began to look for his fellow royals, knowing they wouldn't at all appreciate being disturbed, but needing to find SOMEone. He found Queen Mia, who wanted nothing to do with him right then, and King Raina...looking older than he'd last seen her by far, but paler and...completely unconscious.

Everyone else seemed to have just...vanished, overnight. Colin wandered the halls in a panicked daze, heartbeat speeding up until all he could hear was his own pulse. He finally shut himself in his music room and tried to drown out the silence with piano music, but even that didn't work so well. The notes all sounded wrong.

That was when he remembered his guests. Oh no...it was ten minutes past the time he said he'd meet them in the dining hall! It was a silly thing to be worried about at a time like this, but Colin latched onto it like a drowning man to a plank of wood. He literally flew to the dining hall, and burst inside...and there were his guests. Colin thought his heart might burst from relief. "Dania! Joel! I apologize deeply for being late." Colin bowed to them, still breathing heavily. There was a little trill from behind him as Colin's Tove flew into the room. The Cardinal hadn't been able to stand being completely alone, so had brought Arpeggio along for company. Also for defense if things were to go south...and with the magic making the air crackle...they undoubtedly would.

[Harpsdesire]

They had found something to eat, although not by 'conventional' means: as the kitchen was deserted, Dania had rummaged through the icebox and cabinets herself, eventually fixing bowls of cold cereal and fruit for herself and Joel. She was too nervous to eat much, and although her assistant emptied his bowl, it was not with the usual gusto. They huddled at a table in the corner of the dining room, which still seemed to have a slightly less forbidding aura than the rest of the castle, and waited.

When Colin showed up, Dania almost knocked over her chair as she stood up and rushed over to him. Surely the jack would know what was going on in his court! "Oh, no apologies needed. I'm sure you were terribly busy with... the nobles departing?" Dania sounded half hopeful.

Joel seemed to be feeling better about things now that Colin's arrival proved that they weren't the only ones in the palace. Others were around, even if out of sight, and that was quite comforting to know. "Cool Tove!" Joel suddenly and desperately wanted to rank up to ten so she could have his own familiar. He had no real interest in power or politics, but it would be worth at least trying to gain ranks so he could learn to summon his own tove or mome.

Dania hardly noticed the little creature, as the malevolent magical tingle in the air was quite distracting. It was all she should do to focus on the task at hand. Speaking of which, she wanted very much to finish up her job in the library with all haste and get the heck out of the court before things got any weirder. In the interest of moving things along, she asked Colin as cheerfully as she could, "Shall we head to the library now?" She motioned for Joel to stop staring at Arpeggio and follow her.

Not getting on with what she was here do do would mean admitting how deeply disturbing this whole situation was. Dania wasn't sure she was prepared to deal with that.

[Lucca]

Colin...blinked. He thought very carefully about his reply for several seconds. He hated lying, but he also didn't want to worry the two...then again, lulling them into a false sense of security would be dangerous, given that any number of things might have happened...BE happening...

Slowly, the Jack shook his head. "I'm very sorry, Dania...but I'm afraid I know no more about this situation than you do," he offered with a sad smile. There were deep bags under his eyes, and though he held himself with as much poise as he always did, there was a definite air of tiredness around him. He ran a wing through his crest and sighed. He flashed a brief, faked smile at Joel.

"Thanks. You'll get one yourself someday, I'm sure," he said. "This is Arpeggio," he introduced, and the Tove crooned curiously and wiggled over towards Joel to sniff at him. Of course, at Dania's words, the Cardinal nodded. Secretly, he agreed with her. Even though at this point, the Cardinal couldn't even lie to himself and say there was nothing wrong. But at least it would give them all something else to think about until they could figure out what to do.

Luckily his mind hadn't gone ahead to the part where his guests left and Colin was -really- and truly alone in the Court. "Right. Let's go, then," he said, and led them down the same hall ways as the day before, towards the library. The Tove followed behind, staying rather closer to Colin than he usually might. The odd magic in the air wasn't something Arpeggio cared for either, and he was glad he hadn't been left alone for the day in Colin's quarters.