Jasnah makes an effort to be punctual. Truly, she does. Salas starts to sink and, setting her pen down, the Queen attempts to remove her crown. Y'know. Figuratively. She's not actually wearing the crown. But with a shuffle of paper and a glance at her waiting spanreeds, she puts her desk to bed.
It's just that when she steps outside of her study she finds Renarin pacing the hallway.
"Cousin," she greets him. Apprehensive, if only because of how loudly she reads the agitation in his demeanour. And that's how the next forty-five minutes of the Hateful Hour gets eaten up by an impromptu audience with the youngest of her cousins.
Her mind is still pivoting around Renarin's questions when she finally, finally, finally makes it to Verso's door. And because she's a stickler for presentation, she takes a moment to straighten the skirts on a garnet-coloured havah piped with gold frogging up to its high collar.
...And she'll withhold any apology until she gets a better sense of his mood.
—Verso's mood isn't particularly sour, but having grown impatient, he's apparently in the middle of doing it his damn self. There's black paste all up in his hair (and a little bit on his face, because he's not good at this). All over the white parts, unfortunately! He's not skilled enough to leave them out, nor does he have a real attachment to them.
"Oh. I didn't think you were coming," he says by way of greeting.
She takes in the image of him mid-dye-job. Door ajar, its edge still caught by the tips of her fingers. A series of complicated (and not so complicated) expressions flicker across her face. Fascination; disbelief; reproach; amusement; settling into a mild exasperation.
"I was on my way here when my cousin caught me in the halls to ask some interesting questions about Alethi marriage law. I..."
She trails off. Sounds like that's as close to an I'm sorry as he's likely to get. Maybe if he'd looked a little sadder.
"Could you really not wait an hour?"
Gentle, with a soft thud, the door shuts behind her. Jasnah stalks the perimeter of his personal space, examining his work thus far from every angle. And by the time the tracks to his far side — and notices how the dye itself is covering those stripes of white of which she's actually quite fond.
He doesn't know how to explain that he'd already set himself up to expect the worst to shield against disappointment, so he doesn't. "Sitting there with nothing to do but look in the mirror made me realize the circumstances were more dire than previously thought."
He did wait the majority of the hour, at least. The dye is still wet, little bits somehow smeared onto his neck and chin. It's been a process trying to do this himself.
Taking the 'oh' as disappointment that he didn't wait for her, he says, "Don't worry. There's still ample area in the back that I've missed, I'm sure."
Just for a beat. Long enough for the disappointment to finish blooming and be packed neatly away where it won't show on her face. Still, she can't quite stop inspecting the way the dye has wicked into places she hadn't expected to miss.
Instead, she lifts a hand and — without touching him — gestures vaguely toward the front of his head.
"...I was under the impression," she says, carefully even, "that this was a corrective measure. Roots only."
"—You mean the stripes?" he asks, finally catching on. "It may surprise you, but I wasn't born with them."
This is the way he's meant to look, is what he means. The way he did look for a long time. It certainly wasn't his choice to sport white hair; in Lumière, even a few greys are a rare occurrence now. More than that is an anomaly. It made him stand out, but not necessarily in a good way. Things are different here, admittedly, but it had never occurred to him until— well, right this second that he would ever do his hair any other way.
"Didn't I tell you? The apprentice who used to dye my hair would always muck it up." Said with no small amount of annoyance. Obviously, this has been a pain point. "I kept it rather than risk him turning it green on a revision."
It does surprise her. It wouldn't be so strange to see someone with two such markedly different tones in their hair. Not only could it be parentage (like with her cousins) but it's not that far off from the way Thaylens tend to have white eyebrows no matter what the other hair on their head.
She likely shouldn't say anything. It's a bit cruel, isn't it? To say something complimentary about a thing that's no longer accurate. But he did as good as ask for flattery — that one time, walking to the restaurant. So maybe she should say something and get it over with and...
"I found them quite striking."
The words fall fast from her mouth as she — stares, stock-still, not possessing near enough self-consciousness to so much as fidget under the awkward silence that follows.
It's clear by his expression that, despite the fact that he wants flattery from her, he's not quite sure what to do with it now that he has it. He'd assumed she didn't have a single opinion on his physical appearance, save for maybe 'I'm sure it works for other people'. As long as he looks put together enough to not reflect poorly on her, he'd figured he could shave himself bald from head to toe and it wouldn't even register as noteworthy on her radar.
"Well, that might have been helpful to know beforehand." Why didn't she say anything before he lost the singular physical attribute of his that she's ever complimented??? "I thought maybe it made me look like an old man."
See? It's not just women he thinks need to look young!
Jasnah reaches for the dye pot — gingerly lifting it out of his possession and...and does nothing with it, as this suddenly and unexpectedly starts to look like a two-handed job. All she wanted to accomplish just now was to wipe down the jar with a cloth — supposing the one within reach was acquired for exactly this purpose — but she doesn't want to hold either the pot or the rag with her safehand sleeve.
So, with a decisive hum, she drops the little pot onto the cloth for a second and unbuttons her sleeve up to the elbow. Her hand is (of course) gloved. With that little bit extra mobility, she picks up the pot again and begins to scrub away some smudges. A little tidying before dying the back half of his hair, you see.
"But you never looked like one." Her attention is buried on this small, compulsive little task as she talks. "I'd always assumed you couldn't be any older than me, at any rate."
But he's obviously pleased by the comment, even though of course it makes sense that he wouldn't really look old. At least, not as old as he really is. He's not so sure how he feels about the proof of his real age peeking through in his hair, but it's too late; if he rinses the dye off now, partway through, it'll just look grey.
Since she seems to be determined to finish the job, he settles down in his desk chair, turned away from her so that she can easily see what she's working with. As he does, he says, "I was... thirty-three, I think. When the Fracture happened." Older than he ever should have been by seven years.
She gets to work. Having secured the rolled-up sleeve with a button, Jasnah opts to tackle this task explicitly with her safehand — mostly because it's already got a glove, and she'd prefer not to have dye staining her skin. Awkward, maybe, but she's trying not to think too long or too hard about that particular note of cognitive dissonance.
Fingers tented firmly against the back of his skull, she tilts his head forward. Then, glancing over the supplies, she grabs a small stubby brush that looks as though he may have already used it to glob some of the colour into place. Standing just behind him, she pauses to test the viscosity of the dye. Small, curious steps — she isn't rushing.
She does the math he doesn't say aloud — after all, she remembers how he told her that thirty-three was the most recent gommage before he'd landed here.
But oh, storms, she can't help herself: "Were you not — cursed yet?"
She always uses his word for it. Always, always, always.
Verso keeps his head angled how she tilts it, an obedient customer in Jasnah's first-time-ever salon. He wishes he hadn't preemptively begun to dye his hair for a different reason now; if he hadn't already done it, she would have started at the front, facing him. She might have touched his face.
But he did already do it and she isn't touching his face, so he keeps his head still.
"I'm not sure," he says, and this is one case where he really isn't. He'd felt like he was aging, but would he really know? Verso had been twenty-six. That's not so different from thirty-three. Maybe he's been a fly in amber since his first breath. "I wasn't exactly going around dying in my younger years. The Fracture was the first time I noticed it."
"Not dying, no," she echoes, skeptical. "But no scraped knees? No split lips?"
She turns the question over while she works, briefly imagining what this fidgety man must have been like as a fidgety child. Then she scoops dye onto the little wooden-handled comb and, with a practiced air she does not technically possess, divides the back of his hair into loose sections. She starts at the roots on the lowest section, painting carefully, then works the paste in with the tips of her gloved fingers.
Her touch is precise. Deliberate. Even without prior experience, she takes care not to smear the dye where it doesn't belong — no careless streaks along his neck, no stain at the edge of his ear or collar. Everything contained. Controlled.
"Storms," she adds, dry as ever, "not even a stubbed toe?"
What is he supposed to say to that? Well, I'm not actually sure I ever was a child. Hard to say, really! That's— strange. Makes him sound like some sort of insane freak.
"I— yeah, I remember getting hurt." The key word being 'remember'. Whether he actually experienced it is up for debate. "When I was young. But after adulthood, I couldn't say."
Well. That's an unusual answer. Just as well he's facing away and can't see the faint crease of her frown. Jasnah loads the comb again with a generous sweep of dye and moves one layer higher, returning — methodically — to the roots. She works the paste in with slow, thorough strokes, fingers massaging until it threads between every strand. No shortcuts. No missed spots.
"Hm." She turns the thought over, on the verge of asking, "Did you have any—"
But then she notices his head drifting — almost imperceptibly. Lifting out if its tilt.
She stops mid-sentence. "Head down." Said softly, but still unmistakably a directive.
Her knuckles settle at the base of his skull. A light, assured pressure and she guides him back into place. And then Jasnah resumes without comment, her touch steady again as she continues her work.
Verso's quiet for a moment. It's definitely wrong how much he enjoys the sensation of her fingers at the nape of his neck. The pressure is strangely comforting, and he's inclined to lean into it instead of away from it as she intends, but he suffocates that urge before it can go anywhere.
"Any... what?" he says after that beat of silence. Purposefully obtuse: "Any... secret talents? Admirers? Zest for life, perhaps?"
Any injuries during the Fracture — on account of him mentioning not noticing his curse until then. But the interrogative heat of the moment seems to have passed, and she chews it over while moves onto another section.
"I was going to ask whether you had any other pursuits besides the piano, as a child. But I suppose secret talents will do."
She lies. At least it's not to herself, which is the true cardinal sin. And in this case, she gets the sense that perhaps she'd gotten away with more questions about his curse than she usually does in the run of a mini-interrogation. Besides, she's been learning how to stay on a decent enough card hand. Shifting questions now feels a little like that.
On 'other pursuits': "I held a paintbrush before I could speak." Yet another 'I' that doesn't really belong to him, but there's no other way to phrase it. And— it does feel like it was him, even if he knows it wasn't. He has no other childhood to draw from.
"And I was captain of the swim team at school."
Has he already bragged about this? It feels unlikely that he hasn't, but it bears repeating.
Jasnah understands each of these alone: captain, swim, team, and school. She does not — could not possibly — comprehend what they're trying to say altogether. A team? For swimming? Sounds frivolous, but okay. Sure. Good for you, Verso. Doesn't really sound like the kind of thing that needs a captain, really.
She moves her attention to the crown of his head. Almost done!
"I used to love mechanical puzzles. Are you familiar? All manner of pieces — wood or metal, maybe — and you either have to put them together a certain way or disassemble them instead. The order always matters."
"I wasn't quite so mechanically-minded," he admits. He's an arts guy, not STEM! It does sound fascinating to watch, though, if not do himself. That's what he'd always wished someone could do to him: take him apart and put him back together the right way.
"But," he adds before she can be disappointed in him, "I did help build Lumière's shield dome."
His one and only engineering feat, although help is an important word here. He wouldn't have been able to do it on his own. He couldn't even put a proper roof on his hut on his own, although admittedly part of that was lack of motivation.
"—It's a, uh, dome around the island of Lumière. That acts as a... shield. I guess it's actually rather self-explanatory."
It's STEAM now, Verso. Not just STEM! They opened the doors to creative and design thinking when they added the A-for-Arts. Perfect for logical humanities nerds like this gal.
And because he's offering up this speck of intel on his own, she's going to glide in with the obvious and inevitable question: "Is it also powered by chroma? Like the barrier around the Monolith?"
Well. Obvious and inevitable to her. Mention a shield, and she's going to imagine that it's somehow powered.
In the meantime, she at long last sets the pot of dye aside. But she's not done with him yet; Jasnah gives his hair a good, vigorous comb-through with her gloved fingers. Despite the — intimacy — of the action, it's oddly nice to put her left hand to use. When she'd said she used to love mechanical puzzles, she'd truly meant it in the past tense. The puzzles got harder to do after she started covering her hand at twelve.
Mmm. Don't enjoy this too much, he scolds himself, but he leans marginally into her touch regardless. Just a little. Just enough that he has plausible deniability if pressed.
"No. We can manipulate chroma to an extent, yes, but—not like that. You'd have to be as powerful as the Paintress to do that." Which he certainly is not. For whatever reason, Maman didn't see fit to give him any of her Painting abilities—any of the Painting abilities the real Verso possessed. "It's just a transparent dome around Lumière that keeps the Nevrons out but allows sunlight in."
That's about the extent of his knowledge about it: how it actually works. If she wanted a theoretical explanation, she should have had Gustave isekai into her world instead!
"It just, ah... we felt like we needed to help, after everything that happened at the Monolith."
Urithiru is a marvel of engineering — even if they don't know whose engineering was so marvelous. The strange dug-out space under Kharbranth for its library? Also a marvel, also unexplained. But none of it quite can compare to the idea of a transparent dome. Transparent? Is it glass? Wouldn't that cook its inhabitants?
Jasnah finger-combs the hair back from his temple — organizing it all in one tidy direction. Then, once that's accomplished, she steps aside. She holds her safehand away from her body, hesitant to put it near anything it might smudge.
The deed is done — at least for now. The colour, she assumes, has to set before it can be washed out. But she tries to sneak one last question in before the spell possibly breaks.
"—We?"
She thinks she knows the answer. She wants him to say it, though.
She withdraws her hand, and Verso straightens up. Almost imperceptibly, but not quite. Another case of plausible deniability.
"—Renoir and I," he says without a smidge of emotion. Reciting facts. "He was different then." A moment. "Or at least I thought he was."
As suspected, though, the spell is broken. He stands, placing a hand on the back of the chair and swiveling it around so that Jasnah can sit in it instead if she prefers.
"If I answer any more questions, I'll lose all mystery, and then I'll have to develop an appeal beyond 'dark and enigmatic'." His tone is humorous, purposefully shallow. "Besides, it's only fair that you answer a few. How was your day?"
And while Jasnah does catch how his spine straightens — she's more entangled in the minor revelation that she'd guessed correctly. Renoir and Verso. She nods, brief, like maybe she'd just felt out one of those incremental steps in one of her mechanical puzzles. It satisfies her for the time being.
Instead of taking the now-vacant chair, she busies herself with wiping what dye she can off her safehand glove. The leather is going to stain — but she at least wants the excess removed.
She snorts a laugh at only fair that you answer a few and pauses, thoughtful, as she tries to discern what is or isn't worth sharing about her day.
"I expect we're only days away from abolishing slavery. On paper." She sounds uncommonly hopeful as she says it, but is quick to add — "Getting the words down and signed is the easiest part of what's going to be an uphill cultural battle."
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It's just that when she steps outside of her study she finds Renarin pacing the hallway.
"Cousin," she greets him. Apprehensive, if only because of how loudly she reads the agitation in his demeanour. And that's how the next forty-five minutes of the Hateful Hour gets eaten up by an impromptu audience with the youngest of her cousins.
Her mind is still pivoting around Renarin's questions when she finally, finally, finally makes it to Verso's door. And because she's a stickler for presentation, she takes a moment to straighten the skirts on a garnet-coloured havah piped with gold frogging up to its high collar.
...And she'll withhold any apology until she gets a better sense of his mood.
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"Oh. I didn't think you were coming," he says by way of greeting.
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She takes in the image of him mid-dye-job. Door ajar, its edge still caught by the tips of her fingers. A series of complicated (and not so complicated) expressions flicker across her face. Fascination; disbelief; reproach; amusement; settling into a mild exasperation.
"I was on my way here when my cousin caught me in the halls to ask some interesting questions about Alethi marriage law. I..."
She trails off. Sounds like that's as close to an I'm sorry as he's likely to get. Maybe if he'd looked a little sadder.
"Could you really not wait an hour?"
Gentle, with a soft thud, the door shuts behind her. Jasnah stalks the perimeter of his personal space, examining his work thus far from every angle. And by the time the tracks to his far side — and notices how the dye itself is covering those stripes of white of which she's actually quite fond.
Her reaction is a soft, deflated oh.
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He did wait the majority of the hour, at least. The dye is still wet, little bits somehow smeared onto his neck and chin. It's been a process trying to do this himself.
Taking the 'oh' as disappointment that he didn't wait for her, he says, "Don't worry. There's still ample area in the back that I've missed, I'm sure."
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Just for a beat. Long enough for the disappointment to finish blooming and be packed neatly away where it won't show on her face. Still, she can't quite stop inspecting the way the dye has wicked into places she hadn't expected to miss.
Instead, she lifts a hand and — without touching him — gestures vaguely toward the front of his head.
"...I was under the impression," she says, carefully even, "that this was a corrective measure. Roots only."
A pause. Her head tilts.
"Not a full revision."
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This is the way he's meant to look, is what he means. The way he did look for a long time. It certainly wasn't his choice to sport white hair; in Lumière, even a few greys are a rare occurrence now. More than that is an anomaly. It made him stand out, but not necessarily in a good way. Things are different here, admittedly, but it had never occurred to him until— well, right this second that he would ever do his hair any other way.
"Didn't I tell you? The apprentice who used to dye my hair would always muck it up." Said with no small amount of annoyance. Obviously, this has been a pain point. "I kept it rather than risk him turning it green on a revision."
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She likely shouldn't say anything. It's a bit cruel, isn't it? To say something complimentary about a thing that's no longer accurate. But he did as good as ask for flattery — that one time, walking to the restaurant. So maybe she should say something and get it over with and...
"I found them quite striking."
The words fall fast from her mouth as she — stares, stock-still, not possessing near enough self-consciousness to so much as fidget under the awkward silence that follows.
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It's clear by his expression that, despite the fact that he wants flattery from her, he's not quite sure what to do with it now that he has it. He'd assumed she didn't have a single opinion on his physical appearance, save for maybe 'I'm sure it works for other people'. As long as he looks put together enough to not reflect poorly on her, he'd figured he could shave himself bald from head to toe and it wouldn't even register as noteworthy on her radar.
"Well, that might have been helpful to know beforehand." Why didn't she say anything before he lost the singular physical attribute of his that she's ever complimented??? "I thought maybe it made me look like an old man."
See? It's not just women he thinks need to look young!
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Jasnah reaches for the dye pot — gingerly lifting it out of his possession and...and does nothing with it, as this suddenly and unexpectedly starts to look like a two-handed job. All she wanted to accomplish just now was to wipe down the jar with a cloth — supposing the one within reach was acquired for exactly this purpose — but she doesn't want to hold either the pot or the rag with her safehand sleeve.
So, with a decisive hum, she drops the little pot onto the cloth for a second and unbuttons her sleeve up to the elbow. Her hand is (of course) gloved. With that little bit extra mobility, she picks up the pot again and begins to scrub away some smudges. A little tidying before dying the back half of his hair, you see.
"But you never looked like one." Her attention is buried on this small, compulsive little task as she talks. "I'd always assumed you couldn't be any older than me, at any rate."
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But he's obviously pleased by the comment, even though of course it makes sense that he wouldn't really look old. At least, not as old as he really is. He's not so sure how he feels about the proof of his real age peeking through in his hair, but it's too late; if he rinses the dye off now, partway through, it'll just look grey.
Since she seems to be determined to finish the job, he settles down in his desk chair, turned away from her so that she can easily see what she's working with. As he does, he says, "I was... thirty-three, I think. When the Fracture happened." Older than he ever should have been by seven years.
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Fingers tented firmly against the back of his skull, she tilts his head forward. Then, glancing over the supplies, she grabs a small stubby brush that looks as though he may have already used it to glob some of the colour into place. Standing just behind him, she pauses to test the viscosity of the dye. Small, curious steps — she isn't rushing.
She does the math he doesn't say aloud — after all, she remembers how he told her that thirty-three was the most recent gommage before he'd landed here.
But oh, storms, she can't help herself: "Were you not — cursed yet?"
She always uses his word for it. Always, always, always.
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But he did already do it and she isn't touching his face, so he keeps his head still.
"I'm not sure," he says, and this is one case where he really isn't. He'd felt like he was aging, but would he really know? Verso had been twenty-six. That's not so different from thirty-three. Maybe he's been a fly in amber since his first breath. "I wasn't exactly going around dying in my younger years. The Fracture was the first time I noticed it."
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She turns the question over while she works, briefly imagining what this fidgety man must have been like as a fidgety child. Then she scoops dye onto the little wooden-handled comb and, with a practiced air she does not technically possess, divides the back of his hair into loose sections. She starts at the roots on the lowest section, painting carefully, then works the paste in with the tips of her gloved fingers.
Her touch is precise. Deliberate. Even without prior experience, she takes care not to smear the dye where it doesn't belong — no careless streaks along his neck, no stain at the edge of his ear or collar. Everything contained. Controlled.
"Storms," she adds, dry as ever, "not even a stubbed toe?"
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What is he supposed to say to that? Well, I'm not actually sure I ever was a child. Hard to say, really! That's— strange. Makes him sound like some sort of insane freak.
"I— yeah, I remember getting hurt." The key word being 'remember'. Whether he actually experienced it is up for debate. "When I was young. But after adulthood, I couldn't say."
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"Hm." She turns the thought over, on the verge of asking, "Did you have any—"
But then she notices his head drifting — almost imperceptibly. Lifting out if its tilt.
She stops mid-sentence. "Head down." Said softly, but still unmistakably a directive.
Her knuckles settle at the base of his skull. A light, assured pressure and she guides him back into place. And then Jasnah resumes without comment, her touch steady again as she continues her work.
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"Any... what?" he says after that beat of silence. Purposefully obtuse: "Any... secret talents? Admirers? Zest for life, perhaps?"
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"I was going to ask whether you had any other pursuits besides the piano, as a child. But I suppose secret talents will do."
She lies. At least it's not to herself, which is the true cardinal sin. And in this case, she gets the sense that perhaps she'd gotten away with more questions about his curse than she usually does in the run of a mini-interrogation. Besides, she's been learning how to stay on a decent enough card hand. Shifting questions now feels a little like that.
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"And I was captain of the swim team at school."
Has he already bragged about this? It feels unlikely that he hasn't, but it bears repeating.
"What about you, as a child?"
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She moves her attention to the crown of his head. Almost done!
"I used to love mechanical puzzles. Are you familiar? All manner of pieces — wood or metal, maybe — and you either have to put them together a certain way or disassemble them instead. The order always matters."
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"But," he adds before she can be disappointed in him, "I did help build Lumière's shield dome."
His one and only engineering feat, although help is an important word here. He wouldn't have been able to do it on his own. He couldn't even put a proper roof on his hut on his own, although admittedly part of that was lack of motivation.
"—It's a, uh, dome around the island of Lumière. That acts as a... shield. I guess it's actually rather self-explanatory."
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And because he's offering up this speck of intel on his own, she's going to glide in with the obvious and inevitable question: "Is it also powered by chroma? Like the barrier around the Monolith?"
Well. Obvious and inevitable to her. Mention a shield, and she's going to imagine that it's somehow powered.
In the meantime, she at long last sets the pot of dye aside. But she's not done with him yet; Jasnah gives his hair a good, vigorous comb-through with her gloved fingers. Despite the — intimacy — of the action, it's oddly nice to put her left hand to use. When she'd said she used to love mechanical puzzles, she'd truly meant it in the past tense. The puzzles got harder to do after she started covering her hand at twelve.
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"No. We can manipulate chroma to an extent, yes, but—not like that. You'd have to be as powerful as the Paintress to do that." Which he certainly is not. For whatever reason, Maman didn't see fit to give him any of her Painting abilities—any of the Painting abilities the real Verso possessed. "It's just a transparent dome around Lumière that keeps the Nevrons out but allows sunlight in."
That's about the extent of his knowledge about it: how it actually works. If she wanted a theoretical explanation, she should have had Gustave isekai into her world instead!
"It just, ah... we felt like we needed to help, after everything that happened at the Monolith."
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Jasnah finger-combs the hair back from his temple — organizing it all in one tidy direction. Then, once that's accomplished, she steps aside. She holds her safehand away from her body, hesitant to put it near anything it might smudge.
The deed is done — at least for now. The colour, she assumes, has to set before it can be washed out. But she tries to sneak one last question in before the spell possibly breaks.
"—We?"
She thinks she knows the answer. She wants him to say it, though.
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"—Renoir and I," he says without a smidge of emotion. Reciting facts. "He was different then." A moment. "Or at least I thought he was."
As suspected, though, the spell is broken. He stands, placing a hand on the back of the chair and swiveling it around so that Jasnah can sit in it instead if she prefers.
"If I answer any more questions, I'll lose all mystery, and then I'll have to develop an appeal beyond 'dark and enigmatic'." His tone is humorous, purposefully shallow. "Besides, it's only fair that you answer a few. How was your day?"
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Instead of taking the now-vacant chair, she busies herself with wiping what dye she can off her safehand glove. The leather is going to stain — but she at least wants the excess removed.
She snorts a laugh at only fair that you answer a few and pauses, thoughtful, as she tries to discern what is or isn't worth sharing about her day.
"I expect we're only days away from abolishing slavery. On paper." She sounds uncommonly hopeful as she says it, but is quick to add — "Getting the words down and signed is the easiest part of what's going to be an uphill cultural battle."
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