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C'tis was trying to forget the whole mess of the last few days and he was meeting with moderated success. Music was good like that, calmed him down and relaxed him. Today he was practising his ocarina because it had been too long since he last had and also because he could smirk at Rochelle later and tell her about his practice with a raised eyebrow. It was all in the tongue.

When the voice appeared in his mind Malcarreth did not share it immediately. Stretched out comfortably in his wallow he yawned hugely before responding; Hopefully his twiddling around on the ocarina would have calmed C'tis enough that a reasonably good mood remained. Time to find out.

If it had been a bronze rider there probably would have been stabbing, with eyes at any rate or maybe in eyes if the hypothetical bronzer was especially snotty.

"Could be worse then I suppose."

Scowling to himself C'tis placed his ocarina back in its box and got to his feet. He was just heading through into the more public room of his quarters when the knock came and he wasted no time in getting the door open. This was not because he was polite but rather because he wanted to get on with this.

The sight he was met with was not quite what he had expected; all smiles and handshakes was it? Fine, however they wanted to play. C'tis gripped the greenrider's hand firmly and smiled back, or showed his teeth at any rate.

"You are. I don't get a lot of time off you know," he replied rather flatly, choosing to ignore the bit about good afternoons. "Come in though, I've been waiting for one of your lot to come and see me." It would be interesting to see what line the questioning took. C'tis was hardly a master of subterfuge but if there were undercurrents to Kr'stof's quizzing he hoped he was at least bright enough to notice something was off.

"No."

That was the short answer.

C'tis' lips pursed and he shook his head. "First time I think I actually heard his name was when he accidentally cocked a snoot to all traditionalists everywhere. I don't think I'm his kind of person and he's certainly not mine. Quiet man, harmless so far as I know, reputedly got on unobtrusively with his duty before he vanished." M'onk was to blame, he had no doubt of that whatsoever. Quite what had been done with T'di he had no idea but if he had been killed it must have happened far enough away for the dragons not to feel the loss of one of their own.

"Silly you," responded C'tis, avatar of dry sarcasm, "trying to think like that. If you're not careful you might overheat your poor green-worthy little brain and or faint from the exertion."

Everyone knew his opinion on that score, even M'onk. Perhaps especially M'onk. The greenrider's actual question though... he needed to be wary. Kr'stof might just be making noise about being 'just' a greenrider to try to get on his good side. There was no telling whose side the man was on, or what he would do with any information he gathered.

"If I could change things here, attitudes such as the aforementioned wouldn't exist for a start," he began after a thoughtful pause. "Equality amongst riders, and I suppose handlers too. Not my concern so much because I'm a nasty selfish ******** and it doesn't directly affect me. I know handlers are technically supposed to be on a level with riders but to me at least it seems like they're viewed as being somewhat lower down the pecking order. Ah, and I wouldn't have hatchlings shot either if it were my choice. Wouldn't have had a gold at all come to that, one of the perks of coming here in my opinion was getting away from that nasty little control ability of theirs. If it wasn't golds doing it everyone would be disgusted by the very idea."

There, all of that was quite true and just about what everyone would expect. There weren't so very many other things he would change off the top of his head but one of them was a rather major one. M'onk had to go but he didn't believe he was safe in expressing that to this stranger. For all he knew the pretty little thing was in M'onk's pocket and would see to it that he was vasnished in short order.

C'tis looked at Kr'stof. For a few rather long moments he kept looking. "Yes," he said eventually, "it certainly says something. Progress. Even if the new appointment is a brownrider, she's a woman and that's a new one." His words might be more or less positive but the Secondary's voice was tight, C'tis never had been good faking feelings.

"Why though. Hu." C'tis shrugged eloquently. "Could be one of a number. He never wanted the clutch to be hatched I don't think, so maybe he was looking for any excuse to kill them off. A mutant colour, the first since Ruth, attacking candidates? Frankly the rampage was mild but it might have looked like a good enough excuse in his book. Maybe it was on principle about the colour being abnormal." He was saying a lot of things that would probably lose him his job if M'onk found out. This was supposed to be confidential, right? ...When had he turned into such a crawling little cretin? How much did this post really mean?

Everything.

"Maybe he thought it was genuinely mad and just wouldn't Impress," he added, crossing his arms over his chest and sounding highly sceptical about this suggestion. "Whatever his reason though, no, it's not what we do. I believe it was the wrong decision, about as wrong as you can get, and C'ross shouldn't have obeyed that order." There, he'd said it, and if this got back to M'onk he would probably find himself removed within an hour and that was being generous. There was so much of him that wanted to do what was best for him and his career, but it just made his stomach twist with too much loathing and bile to go through with that. Maybe if he was better at controlling himself and a better actor he could have pulled it off but he wasn't either of those things and Malcarreth wasn't disapproving of what he was saying.



<...You are so much smarter than I am sometimes.>



"Perhaps... mmh. Perhaps M'onk simply suffered a lapse in judgement."