Once, not so very long ago, there would have been a strict order to this sort of thing. Assignments would have been called up according to some strictly enforced schedule, never with more than two dozen magicians or hedge- or ward-witches or any such Talented folk permitted to mill about this particular wood panelled antechamber. 'Permitted'—both in the sense that at one time it would have generally been understood to be an insult as well as a waste of valuable time to keep a Talented individual loitering for long, and in the one where it's is largely frowned upon to put a full company of magic users in one room. It makes the politicians itchy.
Perhaps this regimented shuffling about—dividing up rosters, the handling of orders, the curt reviews and businesslike commissionings—would have still held true when Pela had last found herself in the circuitous rooms of Drayton Hall, the formal headquarters of Their Majesty's Royal Magicians. Today however, there is no such trace of that strict administrative management.
What there is in abundance is quite a bit of talk, the volume of the antechamber being more or less in the range of cacophonous as various knots of men and women in their green uniforms have come to stuff the vestibule full to bursting. Here are pale faced junior officers, largely young children looking for all the world like pretend dolls made up in clothes better suited to their adult peers; there is a contingent of young men gone ruggedly tan and wind chapped, almost certainly dumped here from off some fleet of ships anxiously tugging at their anchors somewhere in the harbor; there is even a pair of senior Fellows, a woman so old she makes the wrinkled man at her elbow seem young, over from the College; and nearly everywhere there are hellos and news and, vitally, gossip being exchanged, interrupted only by the occasional opening and closing of the door at the end of the hall where a harried clerk might appear and so labor to usher along the next handful of magicians to whatever dates may as wait them in the adjacent room.
This holds true throughout the hall save for in one place. Above the center of the long bench which stretches along the interior wall in a single continuous line from one side of the chamber to the other is a niche. Inside this niche is white marble bust of a woman with a fine patrician. And below this niche, flanked on either side by empty seats made outrageously conspicuous by the fact that there is hardly standing room left in the vestibule, sits a man in a black coat to whom no one is speaking at all.
He has one leg crossed over the other at the knee. The metal tipped end of the cane laid over both juts menacingly outward.
hell yeah ✨
Perhaps this regimented shuffling about—dividing up rosters, the handling of orders, the curt reviews and businesslike commissionings—would have still held true when Pela had last found herself in the circuitous rooms of Drayton Hall, the formal headquarters of Their Majesty's Royal Magicians. Today however, there is no such trace of that strict administrative management.
What there is in abundance is quite a bit of talk, the volume of the antechamber being more or less in the range of cacophonous as various knots of men and women in their green uniforms have come to stuff the vestibule full to bursting. Here are pale faced junior officers, largely young children looking for all the world like pretend dolls made up in clothes better suited to their adult peers; there is a contingent of young men gone ruggedly tan and wind chapped, almost certainly dumped here from off some fleet of ships anxiously tugging at their anchors somewhere in the harbor; there is even a pair of senior Fellows, a woman so old she makes the wrinkled man at her elbow seem young, over from the College; and nearly everywhere there are hellos and news and, vitally, gossip being exchanged, interrupted only by the occasional opening and closing of the door at the end of the hall where a harried clerk might appear and so labor to usher along the next handful of magicians to whatever dates may as wait them in the adjacent room.
This holds true throughout the hall save for in one place. Above the center of the long bench which stretches along the interior wall in a single continuous line from one side of the chamber to the other is a niche. Inside this niche is white marble bust of a woman with a fine patrician. And below this niche, flanked on either side by empty seats made outrageously conspicuous by the fact that there is hardly standing room left in the vestibule, sits a man in a black coat to whom no one is speaking at all.
He has one leg crossed over the other at the knee. The metal tipped end of the cane laid over both juts menacingly outward.