"Same price for the voice-link rocks, and a few alarm-sticks to call you in for fires?" 

Wait, what if she's the sort of adventurer who'd set her own fires to be a hero extinguishing them? 

"Say, fifty gold pieces for one alarm stick now, to be refunded by you if we break it and you don't help with the firefighting. If you can help then we'll talk about buying more after."

Wait, what if none of the infusions she sells work except for the ones she offers for testing, by some trick of her strange magic?

"And leave us a few of your hairs, so if you don't show at all when we break an alarm-stick we can scry you to check whether that's because you're injured or captured by something?"

She is running on too little sleep for this. Lesser Restorations help but they're not enough.

"What, we gotta get the coin priests in on this? I'll charge extra for the annoyance. Also, letting you track me, el oh el. El-mao. No. Here, five free samples."

She waves her hand as if doing a slight of hand trick and half slaps them onto the desk, five unassuming wooden sticks.

'el oh el'? 'El-mao'? For a moment she thinks that Weiss has switched to another language, which makes her consider whether she had a translation spell that has worn off at a bad time, which is what it takes for her to finally make the connection between the mystery magic fox who turned out to be a shapeshifting foreign adventurer in service to the Queen and the fox-eared adventurer in front of her. 

Okay. Ignore the foreign slang. Reorient. 

It wouldn't make sense for her to be trying anything fraudulent if she's an agent of the crown. Cressida knows that Ileosa has little respect for the Guard, but if she were to tip into outright hostility then that would probably take the form of some grand dramatic gesture, nothing so petty as selling defective magical services for a few hundred sails.

Wait. Pettiness. Oh gods, this is a gesture of a different sort. One that says 'You can't do your jobs of maintaining order in my city, you're so pathetic that you need the charity of one of my minions who can toss out infusions like pullers⁷ to be able to fulfil your most basic responsibilities.' It's an insult with the fig-leaf of a transaction to avoid making a complete joke of the Guard, a fig-leaf that Ileosa can remove at her leisure whenever she feels like twisting the knife. 

The worst part is, those infusions really would be a godsend now that she can trust them to function. She doesn't have a choice. She's going to have to swallow her pride and accept the insult and assistance alike. 

Maybe if she can bring the streets under control again, the Guard's relationship with the crown could return to a cordial distance? But no. In her heart, Cressida knows this is just the first insult of many from her new queen. 

⁷ Pullers: Tiny, chewy sweets made of sugar, honey, and maple syrup held together with caramel and wheat flour. 

Little Cheliax is not a high-trust society.

It is what it is. Her pride is less important than keeping order, maintaining the law, giving the people of the city a hope for their afterlives.

It's also cutting that Weiss doesn't seem to realize the queen is using her to deliver this insult. The adventurer before her is probably Chaotic Good, sent here by an artful offhand comment of Ileosa's. Biting back at her would just be killing the messenger.

Cressida sighs deeply. Her shoulders slump, and she leans down to open up a drawer of the desk and take out the coinage needed.

"One hundred gold pieces for the fifty castings of Darkness, fifty of the speaking-stones, and with your five alarm sticks thrown in for free? The Guard is very grateful for your generosity."

"Sure, why not." Headshake. "The talk stones... Might go out sooner if you use them a lot, if I'm putting one darkness's worth of magic in. And it'd be better if I had actual rocks. You can wait until they definitely do work to pay up, even, it's not like I gotta make rent." 

She can just go to the Between. It's always summer there. She pushes away the urge to defend herself to the cop. It won't help it never does.

"And I still need conditions to activate the darkness. Could do a command word, a physcial condition like a button to press or a ribbon to pull, or breaking them- Breaking is what I usually do for emergency alarms, but being jumped and also suddenly darkness might be bad."

Frigging cops, always wanting to get fingers in to track and control. But she can put up with the dread and do harm reduction.

She's already thinking about how much the speaking-stones will help her patrols if they're reusable. Damn, maybe that's the queen's angle, making the Guard dependent on these infusions that only her agent can provide so cheaply, a supply that she can withdraw at will to cut them off inside a week once their last delivery expires.

"Here, would these do?" She takes out drawerful of some cheap pewter deputy watch-badges for the speaking-spell, and sends an aide to get a sack of coal intended for the braziers. "Throw the coal like a thunderstone, say 'For the attention of the Guard' to the badge?"

"Throwing activation is easy, but due to weird esoteric mechanics of how I work, the communications will, again, expire much faster if I make them listen all the time for a specific key phrase. If you have to touch the back three times quickly or something to turn it on, they will last for about... I wanna say a couple hours of continuous transmission? If you make them listen for that keyphrase you'll lose at least twenty minutes a day instead of five. -I know, I know, I brought up command words in the first place, but it offends my sense of efficiency now that I think about it."

"You're the one making them, tapping the back should be fine." She makes a note of how they're activated, then starts adding her own instructions of how they should be distributed and used for the captains below her. 

She makes one prototype of each (the coals look ever so faintly darker yet darker, and the badge pairs are now numbered and the numbers will glow faintly when they are active, like so! glow brightness will approximate remaining charge!), double checks the alarm-snap sticks, then says, "Okay, it's going to be a bit tedious now, would you like me to do the remaining 98 somewhere that is not your office?"

Almost as soon as Weiss had started on them, Cressida had returned her full attention to her normal work. Those do look magical!

"Agreed. The north break room should be unoccupied for the next shift," because half the guards on that shift deserted to take over a butcher's shop and the surrounding streets and call themselves the Cow Hammer Boys for some fucking reason "or you can come back later if you'd rather work elsewhere."

Break room's fine by her.

She has a feeling like she's simultaneously being too paranoid and insufficiently paranoid, but can't figure out where it's coming from. 

It goes away as she tediously carefully copies illusions 98 times. It's like writing lines in a notebook, which she was punished with more than once Way Back When.

The hour passes uneventfully. At its conclusion, Cressida accepts them and gives her payment in a tired exchange of gestures, in the middle of dressing down three guards in front of her desk and writing an order that she hands off to a fourth.

Good luck being a cop, cop. She absolutely couldn't stand it.

...She thinks she'll check how much time is left in the day, then go buy some snacks. Pies, preferably apple. Meat, preferably bird. Maybe coffee? And so on.

After that, she'll reasonably-stealthily poke around the graveyard zone again. To look for pharasmins or undead. Is there any section of wall around it that is not particularly watched? Is there magic on the walls?

It's approaching evening, with the time she spent engrossed in her magical crafts. The less cautious street vendors have put their stands out and are doing good business from the less cautious pedestrians out and about; no new riots seem to be happening tonight. Apple pies aren't in season yet, but there are tart berry pastries to be had. If she'd like more than the most mysterious of meats-on-a-stick, she can pay for a whole chicken to be efficiently killed, plucked, gutted, and roasted on a spit for her while she waits. As for coffee, there are a few places selling that at this hour, including the Three Rings where she arranged to protect the docks for those merchants.

The Gray district is almost silent. The cathedral is lit up from within, stained glass and spiral designs aglow with magic. More light sources are dotted around, lit by orison-capable priests on their rounds or Continual Flames. The wall of the district is non-magical, but reasonably well-designed for keeping the occupants inside. There are several fortified watch-points where Pharasmins stand vigil, clerics or lay clergy or the faithful.

However, many of the latter are there more out of a desire to curry favor with the eventual judge of their souls than any true sense of duty, and most are older humans with poor night vision even if they are diligent. The district was not walled off for the sake of preventing intrusion from without, and someone intent on infiltration would have an easy time entering unobserved.

Lack of good talent, thankless work with ever-expanding duties? Perhaps.

It's especially easy to sneak in if you can be invisible and casually leap 40 feet high to alight upon the walls, falling the same distance safely on the other side.

She has a run around the inner bounds, padding barefoot and near-silently, generally exploring and keeping a metaphorical sniff out for anything that might indicate undead or other problems.

And here's where your boop will come in, little adventurer! You're looking for trouble, a particular kind of trouble, so you'll see any particularly strong concentrations of Evil, so long as you maintain this especially vigilant state, at least.

Fiends present in and around the Gray:

- Several imps, most lurking invisibly in crypts or on the wing.

- One rat that detects as a fiend and is following her from the gutters and shadows.

And as she is deliberately looking for trouble, a random encounter with... 1d6 ghouls.

Five of them, to be precise, lurking inside a crypt next to the mass pauper's grave that they've clawed themselves up from. They wear the tattered remains of their burial clothes, already threadbare and dirtied from the hard lives that saw them buried here.

They glare with hate at the patrolling priests far away. Their sense of self-preservation keeps them from roaming the graves and digging up corpses to feast on the carrion to feast on, but should a live body present itself far from any holy symbols then their hunger would overwhelm that caution.

She stops when she spots them and makes sure not to audibly suck in her breath in surprise.

This is really troubling, actually. These things really have all the physical characteristics of undead. But they don't move like zombies. They're glaring at something, and not mindlessly charging it. Is there still some thought in there?

(Entirely separate is her thoughts on the thing where a few of the signatures she's tracking in her movement sense have a little extra something Bad to them now. She's not sure if she's imagining it? Because her powers don't really get better, they haven't for a long time, she's always been around as fast and tough and whatever as she is now, simply a bit more skilled over time... But people do just get Better At Things here, especially after fights. Like with random rioters, otyughs, or derromancers... These thoughts are going to percolate in her head for a while.)

Anyway. She watches from a distance for a few minutes, invisible and silent but making no particular pain to hide her warmth or scent.

The ghouls do not have any special senses with which to detect either of those qualities. As she watches and waits over the next few minutes, one makes to sneak out when all of the patrolling Pharasmins are far away, but another grabs a hold of it.

"Don't be stupid, you'll get caught and the tracks will lead right back to the rest of us," that ghoul chastises in Taldane.

Not only do they retain the cunning of life, they retain language.

Definitely far too disquieting to just wade in there with claw or sword. (She does have one. She rarely uses it.)

...Yeah, she'll cut her patrol short and go... Somewhere. Wandering. Poking that little sense of Extra Bad, maybe.

The creepy fiend-rat continues stalking her as she wanders. 

The next place that will raise her metaphorical hackles is a warehouse on West Dock. Formerly used for storing spices by the scents that still linger on the grounds, just outside it a lithe and finely robed man with tattoos of snakes on his arms is completing a transaction with a pink-haired woman. She hands over a clinking pouch of valuables, cold and businesslike, and he hands to her an ornate jeweled key with a self-satisfied smile.

Both the man and the key feel distinctly off to her new sense, the key comparable to the imps, and the man more strongly so. 

She's increasingly sure that the sus thing she's feeling is imps. Which means it is Evil, as conceived here... Which is sure something, sure let's just call it 'evil' and have you believe it because it's icky... But it'd be silly to be blind... Ugh. She hates politics. Still, these two are worth noting, too. She takes a detailed illusory record of the scene, saving it in a dress button, and tries to listen in for any parting words.