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Madness. Simply madness! Viltre gnawed at a stone, grinding it down between strong teeth. Low-grade fright mixed with sheer frustration in the moment, leaving the scribe hunched over by the wall. Normally, his mask filtered such strong emotion, amplified and tuned it to useful end. But this...! No. NO! This will not stand! I will not accept this! The tall young man twitched his frame towards the scriptorum, and immediately flinched away. Whatever was inside... I. I may need to stop. Wwwoorking. For a time. Just a short one. Master myself. Another chunk of stone was crunched away from the main mass.

Recent horrors whirled around in the secondboy's skull, enough to drive him away from.work of any kind. Even his pranks were an affecation, something he strove to perfect as a useful cover for his real activities. The most recent had been a tricky little arrangement of string, hooks, a canvas tarpaulin and ice. The whole thing gathered water as ice melted, collecting at the shallow bottom of the tarp. The tarp itself was stretched tight to the ceiling, so that the drip looked as though it simply came from the roof somewhere. It'd been in a large empty room, the one Merle repurposed as a dance studio for Niiemh. Later, Fajra. ...That might have been a bit subtle. How to make that better- no. No work. Just. Relax...

He'd begun to wander, still working at what seemed a crystalline stone in his hand. For once, the redhead couldn't focus, distracted by what he'd seen in that room. The shouts from the very site he'd rigged up were what caught his attention. What? That isn't ready! It's not time! ...Wait, is that Fajra? Oh. Oh! She didn't exactly snap him out of his addled state, but his cute lil' sister was something to focus on. He'd arrnged to teach her a few tricks, hadn't he?

Fajra's brother took to bouncing the stone in his hand, letting it announce his arrival more than his footfalls. Had the scribe a mirror, he might have realized how unraveled he looked. A sharp contrast to the the normally composed Viltre. The smile was tired, his hair uncombed, and the dark circles under his eyes spoke of a sleepless night. "Hey there, sis. Sorry I'm late; scriptorum's been in a state the last few days. Was teachin' ya a couple tricks, right?"

Outright slander? From his own little sister? Inconceivable! She doesn't do that unprompted, tho'. Green eyes blinked, then narrowed in thought, the spare hand coming up to pat his scalp. "Is it Thirdday? It's probably Thirdday, right?" Time had got a bit runny on his official work. All-nighters were not meant to be done in an office. He gnawed at an irregularity on the stone. "Pretty sure this is my break."

Still, he was where they'd meant to meet, and so was he. As good a time as any to teach her a few tricks, no? Viltre eyed the ceiling, checking the curve, and shuffled to one side. He'd set it over Merle's usual supervisory spot. No need to get dripped on if it came up early. "So Mother's been teaching you balance, footwork, yeah? What do you know about how your hands and eyes move?"

An exhausted sign escaped Fajra's stooped brother. "There's been no time to spend away from the job 'til now. We recently acquired a smaller tannery business about to go under. Mother assigned integrating their books to me, and I think that was last Fifthday. At this point, I'm convinced that they summoned an evil spirit to manage their finances. It makes no sense, it's all in some hideous mishmash of Oban, Tale and Alkidike scipt, I've got to cross-reference two dictionaries and three encyclopedias so far. Their arithmetic should be useless jumbles, but I'm seeing functional numbers anyway, possibly out of spite." All of it came tumbling out in a rush, the fingers in his hair gripping the skull beneath. For a moment, his jaws creaked, finally cracking an outcropping of the stone away from the main mass. The ensuing gravel crunched solid between merciless jaws as he came back to himself.

"Grabbed a chunk of crystal candy to help me think, and, well, remembered my promise. I'm not late, am I?" Keeping his word, preventing a joke from happening too early, and putting distance between himself and the scriptorum for a while?A shudder crawled up his spine, straightening Viltre's posture. "Honestly, showing you some basic tricks sounds downright theraputic. I've got a stack of coins we can start with, if that's alright?"