Araari, upon it occurring to her that she was asked a question and should probably answer the question, is just going to start sobbing. Kind of almost wailing, honestly. If anyone tries to approach her she flails around to try and get away from them before curling up into a ball.

"--Sorry--"

Oh god. He really did somehow cause Araari to meltdown.

"Araari, Araari, it's okay. He made it. You made it. You're safe."

Araari is no longer in active danger and neither is Mordred and somehow this is the thing that makes everything that happened today hit her. She puts her hands firmly over her ears and curls up smaller, smaller, smaller, as small as she can.

That is very very fair of Araari, honestly, Mordred is more than familiar with panicking only when it is safe to panic. He keeps holding Lev and doesn't approach her; he's pretty sure being crowded would only make it worse.

"Do you... want anything...?"

Araari cannot HEAR Anita because her hands are over her ears and she is being loud enough that the only sounds she can hear are the ones she is making.

Four minutes later, Araari quiets, breathing ragged but no longer coming in half-screams, and very slowly uncurls. She fixes her netela where it got disturbed.

She’s still crying, but.... less violently. Quietly: “I’m sorry. It just—all today, it hit me at once, and—I’m sorry.”

She presses her back against the wall, muscles tensed like she’s bracing for a hit.

"It's alright. Take all the time you need. Breathe. Do you want some water?" Zoe can get her water.

“I wasn’t even—wasn’t even hurt, they didn’t get me—water sounds lovely. Thank you.”

Zoe brings her a glass.

Was there anything else they learned. "Peter Lukas was at the warehouse, that's where they were keeping him," he tells Lev quietly. "Don't know if that means anything."

"They had him in an office, before they brought him to the car."

Araari sips at it! “I was rescued by a, a knight, Sir—Martin Blackwood, he didn’t like it when I called him sir, he lives in the catacombs and wants to be allies against the cultists, he’s the one who gave me Victoria Prescott’s name—he can meet with us here tomorrow, he has a library, kept—offering to make me tea—“ Araari starts crying more intensely again but is no longer entirely hysterical.

"....as the person who was murdered, you don't need to apologize, that must have been terrifying," he says to Araari. "Did Martin Blackwood look like," and he describes, loosely, the man he met in the newspaper archives and knows as Adam Vizarri.

“Yes,” she says. “Do you—know him—?”

"I met him in the newspaper archive and saw him the first time I went to the hospital."

She wipes at her face and takes a deep breath. “He. Wasn’t sure if we were with the cultists at first, thought we were because of how much we talked to them, except then we were trying to save the children— oh— Greece, France, Morocco, the Netherlands, Germany, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Italy, Spain, England. That’s where the Nectar here ships to. And Mexico, there’s a different ship for Mexico.”

When he realizes she's listing places he starts noting them down.

EVENTUALLY Lev will consent to allow mordred to disentangle himself from him so he can go shower, and stop being Entirely Salt.

Getting the salt off him feels like shedding a too-small skin.

He looks down and across his stomach and half of his right thigh his skin is a rainbow color.

He might recognize it from the natural history museum as nacre.

It is, in a very alien way, beautiful.

It's very beautiful. It is also not his skin. Or it is his skin but it shouldn't be.

Not dying when drowned: not a particularly human thing to have happen to a person.

(If he'd had any other day, he would probably be melting down. But-- he died today, and he isn't dead now, and he has this to thank for it. He's not totally sure what feelings he has. Probably there are some?)

He just kind of............ stares at it, for a few minutes. And then finishes showering and curls up with Lev and doesn't say why his hands are shaky.

In the morning they wake up. Whatever supernatural thing happened about the New Moon, it doesn't seem to have shown any signs in their hotel room.

The newspaper is also silent about the subject. The headlines are as follows:

-Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Affairs Minister, ended his European peace tour in Prague with the statement, "In the world today no nation can prosper on another's ruin. We are too intimately connected for that. We stand and fall together."
-Hermann Göring visited the Free City of Danzig in an attempt to influence Sunday's parliamentary elections in favour of Nazi candidates.

with nothing obviously supernatural even in the back pages.

"Okay, I understand that everyone is pretty shaken up? But if possible I would really like to know what we know about the factory before deciding whether to go back again today."

Ugh fuck they were so concerned with personal issues like Mordred getting kidnapped and drowned that they neglected to stop the world ending, is Oswald's first thought upon waking up, before looking around and observing that it appears to still be intact.

"Let me see the accounts?"