He wouldn't fall for such antics again, however. This time, he was about as rested as he could manage, given recent events. He faced the need to write a strategy that would pay back threefold the torment sustained by the Negaverse (or, more specifically, by his team). He needed such a plan with a measure of expedience, and his answer to that was to print out what was known of the involved enemies from the Intelligence Database, and then find a secluded spot near the edges of the Great Hall where he could come up with something in relative peace*.
Thus did Faustite lounge on a stone bench with his elbows propped on a larger slab of a table. A number of White Moon foes, their reports, and their photographs were spread out before him, where Faustite had been using his nib pen to underline potential weaknesses for exploitation.
What bothered him most, however, was that they knew so little about the relationships between these White Moon wastrels. These targets were hardly seen together, and Aelius didn't see enough of their interactions to draw any reliable conclusions. Even for the two who held the lion's share of blame for Aelius's kidnapping, Faustite couldn't say with certainty whether they worked together enough to be called friends or not. He hadn't seen that Cybele squire until the day he recovered the boy from such a mess.
Untangling their relations to one another was such a ******** headache that Faustite wondered if he had any shot at all for avenging Heliodor and his soon-to-be-defunct identity. Sighing a long plume of smoke, he rested his chin on his hands while he scanned over the scattered papers for the dozenth time.
*Relative peace entailed a location where it was highly unlikely that his himbo of a husband would stumble upon him and begin distracting him with the usual torrent of verbal diarrhea that left the blessed boy's face as naturally as a bird leaves the nest. The boy was a walking billboard of distractions, and Faustite soon learned that he could accomplish far more in a public location than he could in the seclusion of his office as long as Albite knew how to break in and run his mouth about it.
kaefaux
