Board Thread:Role Plays/@comment-25389303-20191221164519/@comment-5999656-20191222073503

A young woman with crimson eyes and black hair tied back in a tight ponytail stood at the top floor of a gleaming glass high rise building, the lavish modern office nearly vacant as its sole occupant gazed out at the grey cityscape sprawled before her. The windows of the buildings reflected the distorted shapes of cars and passerbys moving down below like toys, which the woman scanned pensively while her mind wandered elsewhere in the absence of visitors.

So many months after the fall of Beacon, the kingdom was surprisingly at peace. It wasn't just the everyday surface world before her which had settled back into an ordinary rhythm. Vale's criminal underworld politics were borderline pristine, undisturbed like the surface of a frozen pond. How long ago was it that she last saw agitation in the waters? Too long, Zanipher thought. As the Dragon whose role was ensuring minimal conflict within the network, the fact that the shadow empire itself was absent of inciting factors meant that her job was beginning to become borderline moot.

But of course, the trouble hadn't gone away. Trouble was a people, a people who had just moved locations, traversing the seas to settle in a neighboring kingdom whose populace was even less uniform than that of Vale's. Most importantly, it had moved to a world where the Dragons' reach was thin and sparse, out of her sight but not exactly out of mind. Far from it, actually.

"Idiots," Zanipher muttered out of the blue. She reached up and ran a hand swiftly through her hair, pushing back stray strands which were dangling over her forehead. The sun's direction changed ever so slightly, so that the Dragon could suddenly see her own reflection in the glass. Her face glowered coldly back at her, eyes lit a vivid crimson by the rays shining straight into her face.

The Syndicate's greatest protection against the law had always been their two-faced nature. They posed themselves as benign private investigators, sent their children to Hunter academies, serviced influential members of society and occasionally attended fancy evening galas held by prominent Valean businesspeople. The mask ran deep, something that those two agents should have remembered before they pulled out their weapons on uniformed officers. They could have easily introduced themselves as undercover Hunters with the licenses they held, and teamed up with the police to escape the facility. Instead, because of their actions, the Mistral branch of the Daybreak Syndicate was rushing to clear their databases of all criminal knowledge in the face of a very likely police raid.

And here she was, the Ninth Dragon of Vale, waiting for the aftershocks to begin... because she was going to have to be the one keeping things as together as physically possible.

Zanipher's desk phone rang, stirring her from her self-absorbed frustration, and she crossed the distance in a few strides and brought the telephone to her ear without a word. There she stood frozen for a brief moment, as the desk attendant informed her that a particularly recognizable visitor had arrived - and could she please come down soon before anything else happened.

"... I'll be down right away," she replied quickly, returning the phone to its stand with a clatter. She hurried to the elevator and got in as soon as it arrived with a ding, punching the button for the first floor, and clasping her hands before her with a sharp exhale as the elevator began to move.

Zan had anticipated the tenseness in her chest, and she took a few slow breaths to calm herself. By the time the glowing numbers dialed down to 1, she had regained a neutral composure, though the uneasiness still fluttered underneath her skin. After all, she was going to have a lot of explaining to do in the next few minutes if she still wanted to patch things together.

Zanipher stepped out of the elevator, and without further ado approached the white-suited man waiting a few feet from the doorway.

"I'm sorry, Decade. Did I keep you waiting?"