It's Faye, not Layla, who's approaching Kalin at this point, with Zachary in the child carrier. Faye is Layla's mother (and Zachary's grandma), a rather undistinguished woman in her late forties who looks her age. Layla, 26, is off getting introduced to the Tsuirakuan teaching mage. Faye doesn't really qualify as a "young woman." Doesn't impact the action, though. So back IC:]4uk4ata wrote:hary bobbing along in the carrier and thinking it great fun. "I think we're alone," she puffed. "At least I don't see this man Vikor. So like he says: what happened here?"
I stiffle an overwhelming urge to curse as the young woman and the - child - come here. "I'd love to tell you, miss, but I'm not so sure myself."
Faye pocketed the small gun, hoping Kalin hadn't seen it; it wasn't going to be needed, from the looks of things, and he was already upset enough without firearms being waved around. "Let me see that thing," she said.
The runes on the small stone-like object that Kalin handed here didn't look familiar. At first she wondered whether they might be elven; a job far in her past, when she'd been a single mother raising a young and headstrong daughter, had involved the recovery of some elven artifacts (and the ... elimination ... of the people who'd stolen them), and they'd had a similar set of characters incised into their surfaces. However, even though she didn't speak the elven language, she thought she could at least recognize their alphabet. These characters weren't part of it.
But there was another language derived from the elven one that might fit. "Tsuirakuan," she said, handing the stone back to Kalin. "More precisely, ancient Tsuirakuan -- very ancient. They stopped using these hieroglyphs centuries ago. I'm not absolutely certain that that's what this writing is, but I think so. Where did you find this, and what does it do?" But truthfully, she wasn't all that interested in the stone itself any more; she was more interested in what her daughter was doing in an ethnic enclave that might have left things like this lying around -- and might have secret societies using the old language.
---------
Faye had no way to know it, but Layla was idly looking at a remarkably similar object in Kinabalu's laboratory at that very moment, as she awaited the return of her mother and son.
---------
"Wicked gills, dude."
I've killed men for less than that, Gryffyd thought as he stared coldly at the cheeky young man who'd joined Jamie. If I guess right, though, this is the other guy we're supposed to be keeping an eye on, and keeping safe, not killing. Waste of resources if you ask me, but they didn't ask...
"Ms. Porter, perhaps you could illuminate your ... partner ... here on the business proposition that we have been discussing," he said, his voice as neutral as he could make it.