Welcome to Gaia! ::

It was a neat office with minimal personal effects or touches beside how things were organized or her insistence that the chairs be comfortable. There was a sleek little PC on her desk, a stack of files aligned with the far corner waiting for her to to review, an open notebook resting on the blotter in front of her with a a few lines of scrawled notes taking up the top quarter of one page. She had her pen in her hand, her cheek resting against curled knuckles and elbow resting on the desk. Her attention seemed to be on the notes, but she hadn't written anything new in close to ten minutes.

Her mind was elsewhere. Likely she was as preoccupied with the the impending meeting with Schorl as much as Ochre, but with less obvious fidgeting. Apprehension had settled heavily on her shoulders like a weight, and with every passing minute leading to the meeting she found herself less and less sure she wanted to know what information the other woman had managed to come up with regarding Umber.

No news meant there was still hope that he was out there somewhere and could come walking back into their lives at anytime. There was worry, of course there was, but wasn't it better than the alternative?

She tried to think think back to how she'd felt before she'd known for certain Bischofite was gone. If the unknown was harder to endure than the loss, but she was having trouble thinking beyond the buzzing in her own head. Ochre getting up to drag his chair around to her side of the desk came as a welcome distraction.

It brought her out of her own daze and she lifted her head to offer him a comforting smile, the hand with the pen dropping to rest on his thigh beneath the desk.

Ochre's reception of Schörl came with a quiet "oh." Absently, his hand found Xenotime's under the desk, and he listened through Schörl's lack of introduction as raptly as he could.

He wasn't sure what a denouement was, but guessed it was some kind of explanation. Maybe a verdict. Ochre wet his lips and waited, feeling suddenly very small and very aware that they were both listening very hard to what Schörl had to say. They'd take her at her word, because she was very good at her job, very good at a job they couldn't do, and they would trust what she said. They'd listen to what happened, and then maybe they'd team up to go rectify it. Then life would just… keep going.

Ochre's grip on that hand tightened when the first papers hit the desk. He reached for them with his free hand, tremulously, then opened them onto the desk. What he saw was his brother's handwriting, and he felt a well of nostalgia bubble up over what Schörl was saying. He looked at the next, and saw the familiar Intel template with typing that matched his brother's speech patterns. The third was one of his more sinister projects. Follow-up, Ochre guessed, to one of his old Negaverse projects. Probably something about starseeds.

The rest of it wasn't sounding hopeful. The photographs he left on the table; he could see well enough from where he was. Part of him didn't really want to look at all — didn't want to be reminded of the way his brother kept house. Those were memories better left in the dark. Memories that he wanted to keep quiet until Schörl finished what she was saying and left them be.

Ochre swallowed, nodded slowly. His attention settled on the page with Umber's hunting logs — his regular ones. "Okay," Ochre broached waveringly, "so he disappeared." Everyone gathered that much, but that wasn't why they asked Schörl to finish looking for him. But Ochre couldn't muster the words to ask for more. Instead he squeezed Xenotime's hand, and looked to her to ask the question he didn't want to hear.