[CLOSED]

[reshapes]

WHO: Kostos & Bartimaeus
WHAT: A Perfectly Average Meeting, No Shenanigans Here, No Sir.
WHEN: Now
WHERE: Hostile Powers Office
NOTES: N/A, will update if applicable

The feathered creature leaps from the highest point of Kirkwall's tallest roof at midnight, a nearly perfect black shape against a still blacker sky. It ascends with a single beat of silent wings and the stepped city falls away beneath it, transformed by the night into a sketch of shadowed streets and rare amber jewels of lanterns on street corners or tiny pricks of candlelight winking warily in their windows. For a few seconds, the beast corkscrews higher still. At that very moment a wind, born warm at the continent's interior, finally reaches the last leg of its long journey across Sundermount. It finds the bird, or the bird finds it. At once, the pair of them turn to back their run for the sea.

They skate across tiled rooftops and wing about crooked chimneys, invisible if not for the flicker of green light oozing between the bird's talons. In rapid succession they sweep over narrow Hightown courtyards with their winter bare flower beds. The bird's shadow dances briefly across a dozen tarpaulin shades of a Lowtown market. The wind picks up and carries a choked cry from a Darktown alley. Then they, wind and blacker-than-a-raven-bird both, are gone: coursing through the perfect wine dark between the star pricked sky and the harbor's purring water, toward the horrible jagged shape of the fortress beyond.

The journey might take an hour on foot, to say nothing of crossing the pitching waterway in the dark - an almost impossible task at this hour, if rumors of the curfew are to be believed. Bird and wind make it to the fortress in minutes. There, they part ways. The wind blows on to the sea, already chilling. The bird, laboring now on its own, drops to a likely sill and rolls like a stunt play actor through the propped window and into the office beyond.

It's changing shapes even as it does, so that the thump of impact on the ground behind a miscellaneous piece of furniture doesn't correspond to the dimensions of a bird at all. It is, however, a perfect match for the boy who sits up from behind the chair soon thereafter. The cursing, evidently directed at the pulsing glow of the rift shard in his left hand, is equally far more appropriate for a person-shaped mouth than for a bird's beak.

He's halfway through a particularly colorful expletive when he pauses, having suddenly recognized the presence of the small light burning at the desk. It'd been too removed or too dim to see from the outside. Or possibly he'd been too distracted by the gnawing tear in his Essence to notice it. But from here? Oh, it's quite obvious from inside.

As is the man sitting near it.

"--cking... Oh," says Bartimaeus, followed by a pause of supreme awkwardness. "My, well if someone isn't burning the midnight oil."