Welcome to Gaia! ::

It took a few minutes for the door to be answered. The man on the other side of the door wasn't particularly tall, but he was long-legged as hell and seemed bigger than he was for it. "Good afternoon," he said, bodily blocking Zac from entrance. "Do you have business here?"

"You're in the right place," the man said, stepping aside so Zac could enter. "I apologize if I seem terse. We've had quite a little spate of vandalism lately, and I've only so much patience for the police trying to pin it on our interns." Once Zac was inside the front hall, the man closed the door and extended a hand. "My name is Renard Leroux. We corresponded by email."

"Mm. Yes." Renard looked down to the boy and smiled, a crooked little smirk with an odd edge to it. "I'm fifty-seven years old, Mr. Bantock. Since you seem so surprised."

He hmmed for a moment. "I'm surprised you haven't come across it in your research, actually. It's an old design. Elderly academics like myself enjoy arguing about it in symbology journals." Then he turned his attention back to Zac. "Though I'm sure that doesn't interest you. Let me show you through the house--it's an interesting relic of mid-19th century construction, and we're quite lucky to have it--of course it was built on the site of an earlier Jacobean building, which was burned during King Phillip's War. William Ozymandias Shore built this home atop the same floorplan, which is a very modern line of thinking for one so antique--but you read about that, of course?"

"It's hardly my field of expertise," demurred Renard as he led the way out of the entre-sol and into what appeared to be a long hallway running the length of the house. To the right, a set of stairs climbed up to the second story; there was a velvet rope across the bottom of the stairs. Renard led Zac to the left, into what appeared to be a parlor. "I'm a historian; my interest in the sigil is a hobby, not a true avenue of study."

He spent the next several minutes expounding on the Queen Anne style furniture, leaning one-handed against a deep couch with scrolled arms: "Though the home was redecorated in the 1950s in that modern style, after the acquisition of the house by the Estate the first floor has been redecorated to match photographs of Sunday Shore-Virolai's public spaces. Each piece is handmade, as could be expected for the time. Most of it is in the Queen Anne style, which would have been popular in Ms. Shore-Virolai's youth; this parlor, however, sports the Classical Revival-meets-Art-Deco style which was popular around the time of Mr. Jeremiah Tailor's death, which is an interesting subject all its own--"

He seemed like he could go on for hours as he led Zac out of the parlor and into the adjacent library. Probably Zac would have to interrupt to learn anything of use... unless he already had?

Renard frowned at that. "I'm not sure there's much to find. The exact circumstances of his death were never... discovered."

He frowned at a vase for a few moments longer before leading Zac into the formal dining room. "Here," he said.



"Jeremiah Tailor is all the way to the right," said Renard. "To the left is... to be quite sure, no one's sure. Many advance the theory that she was Ms. Shore-Virolai's December lover, but I have never personally thought so. And in the center is Ms. Shore-Virolai."

"Of course," said Renard. He gestured towards the paintings. "Please don't touch them."

Jeremiah Tailor is a dignified-looking man in a deep plum suit, a high Arrow collar, and a jet-black tie. There is something familiar in the delicate brushstrokes that make up his face, a patrician look that harkens back to the idea of the philosopher-king. But the body and the way he stands are odd, too slim to be properly proportionate. The whole painting is stiff, workmanlike, except for the intensity of the pale blue eyes.