“Put him in the coffin.” You command to which the maid, who isn’t currently having a panic attack, oblidges. You wish you could stay and have a suitably dramatic reveal of the picture or go back up and do [i]something[/i], but you can hear the noises of dozens of footfalls above you. Knowing Marie’s boisterous nature and her penchant for humor you know this “bit” as she calls them, could go on for hours with her never losing steam, and that means for the rest of the day, even after she departs, this estate will see more activity than a beehive who had three wasps intrude on their domain. Your best move here is to make a tactical retreat and regroup. You have enough information that could lead to the fall of one of the most influential noble houses in Lindan, perhaps it would be best to go to safety and think about what your next move should be.

“It is done,” Alyssa says before kneeling down and lifting the large coffin over her shoulder. You nod in acknowledgement before looking toward Rory.

“There should be an exit that leads somewhere outside,” She says through her hand, having covered her mouth after dry retching.

You don’t say anything as you go about looking for it. Instead, you call or you suppose “buzz” Marie three times with the walkie-talkie, a code to let her know you’re leaving the premises. You wish that Beneger had given you equipment that could communicate with more than just Marie. How nice it would be to instantly let the Lord Inquisitor know of the rot here at this house, but alas, technology like that exists only in the realm of fantasy. Or perhaps a storage room with a strict guard patrol. You suppose it doesn’t matter, you have to work with what you have in this life.

Regardless, you find a spiral staircase in an abandoned corner and take its cobweb-laden stairs to an outside exit. With everyone inside so preoccupied by the yelling you can fear flowing from a cracked window, the three of you manage to commandeer one of the estate's groundkeepers' wagons and make your way to the cobble streets of the exburb close by. It’s a march that happens in silence, Alyssa is ever quiet, Rory is having a crisis, and you’re too lost in thought to speak. The silence is only made comfortable when Marie meets you outside the pub, you’ve been waiting with an all-too-smug smile on her face. Then she’s more than happy to fill the social void with a dramatic reenactment of everything she put Percy and his father through as she behaved like a wyvern in an alchemy shop during the hour-or-so she “investigated” the Bloodgrave’s Capital Estate.

She even managed to get a giggle out of Rory and a smile from Alyssa when she spoke of how she spent fifteen minutes getting Lord Bloodgrave to describe the purpose of a potted plant. Apparently, it is because it “looks nice.”