Tausahira was in trouble. She’d really tried not to overhear the conversation Lytek had been having, because she was pretty sure he was having it with himself and thus she shouldn’t have been privy to it, but she couldn’t help over hearing bits of it.
“Two of them?” he’d muttered. Then there was a pause followed by “...and a Solar?” As he continued with “Yes, I’m well aware of it...” she’d already found the files in question (she knew exactly where they were) and had deposited them on his desk with her usual efficiency and forgotten (again) to wait to be told.
Her boss’s glare could have melted jade and she wasn’t sure she didn’t have sunburn as she backed off and scurried away to hide behind a pile of misfiled requests for information and pretended really hard to be working. Inevitably, that meant she did end up working and steadily sorted the pile into several new ones which each would need stamping with a response. The “Thank you for your esteemed request, but the Department of Exaltation cannot at this time provide the requested information” pile was by far the largest and she wondered just what exactly everyone wanted. The top file was marked with an unusual sigil – Vanileth’s she thought, she hadn’t seen that one for a while – and she scanned the page.
It had something to do with an Exaltation shard in the First Age so it was hardly a surprise it got a big red “No” stamped all over it, but it then went on about an airship which she thought was pretty cool. It would definitely make a change from travelling by barge and her thoughts couldn’t help but drift to Creation and what it might be like to float over land and sea and see the Blessed Isle and the lands of the East she’d been reading about so recently in all their glory.
She’d soon turned the pile into a stamped set of responses ready to be sent back out into the Bureaucracy of Heaven and with her work complete she decided not to chance an encounter with the boss and instead found some old scrap parchment and began folding origami. She’d not practiced in an age, but the request from Vanileth’s domain had been pretty detailed. And so it was that much later, when Lytek came to investigate the gentle snoring, he found her curled up asleep and surrounded by little paper models of airships.