"I can definitely see it being a very different perspective," she says with a nod. "And that makes sense as a reason to take some time off getting used to it. I..."

She blushes, and grins sheepishly. "I had to be ordered to take my vacation." She shakes her head a bit to clear it, the worry about work fraying her smile slightly for a moment. "Similar reasoning about picking the Bowers over Sensefest, though: it just looked like the experience would be too much, y'know? What do they complain about most, if you don't mind my asking?"

"I'm glad to hear you're liking the new place, too. The right environment makes such a difference, from what I've seen. One of my favorite projects at work was improving the placement analysis algorithms, to support better matching of incoming refugees to well-suited places to live. Learned a lot about how important the right environment can be to a person, working on that, especially the ways that subtle differences can have profoundly different impacts on different people."

She smiles fondly as she watches Pigeon conjure up her art, then looks down at the cards as they're spread out before her.

And stops, for a moment, completely frozen for a beat. Then she takes a deep breath, a tender, enraptured smile on her face.

"Oh. These are lovely. They're so elegant and bright and... I think the best description that comes to mind is 'tender, elegant glory'. I love them."

She gazes happily at the art, back and forth between each piece, with a happy sigh.

"Mostly the drugs and the bloodsport. I know, I know, everything's supposedly safe, I don't actually believe it though. They talk about how people try to imitate sensefest in their actual lives and how it never goes well. I'm happy you get to do something... Happy and uncomplicated, relatively speaking. Getting to change people's lives. Getting to help people. I don't expect my art will ever make that much of a difference to anyone. Though I am glad you like it. These were for a dressup game that a friend was making, but they didn't deliver on the code or the writing. I still really like them though."

"I worry about that too, the bloodsport especially — though maybe partly because I'm really curious about that. Drugs don't worry me as much. They mostly only turn endemic when there are deep ways the surrounding society is hurting badly. Have looked at a lot of studies, done meta-analysis of the mess. But eh. Not the point." She shakes her head. 

"I don't... I love my work, but I don't know that I can call it uncomplicated. I'm always worried I don't have the assessments accurate enough, or that I'll miss some need someone has, and someone we could've a great life to will wind up in a situation that's not right for them at all, and they'll hurt for it. Get someone's hopes up that they're escaping to someplace better, drop the ball, dash their hopes."

"I'm not wor—" She takes a shaky breath. "I have a hard time seeing myself as worthwhile, as good enough, while there are still hellworlds we haven't emptied, while people we rescue don't get as good a life as they could."

"Oh." 

Pigeon looks away. 

Sable's eyes widen, and she looks down briefly, guilty. Why did she bring that up? Terrible, terrible, terrible idea. Maudlin fool of a fox.

She shakes her head, opens her mouth to speak, closes it again, looks back down. Running away wasn't how she got through the feelings in the first place, and it won't save the conversation now.

"Sorry," she says, her voice soft and somber. "Not great 'getting to know you' banter, kinda derails the casual lightness. D'you wanna... hear the whole story, and more specifics of what brought me out of it? Or we can talk about something else, anything you'd like."

"I... yeah, let's please talk about something else." She takes a resigned slurp of her shake.

Sable nods with a bittersweet smile, looks down at her cocoa, and takes a sip, savoring the rich flavors for a moment.

Yep, that was a bad play. She rolls her eyes at herself internally, and casts about for a topic.

Ah, maybe this? "Tell me your favorite things about Vallmer?"

"Um, well, it's really clean and there's really nice achitecture. They go in big for stained glass windows. I used to dream about making them, but... they're all portraits of saints and things, and you have to be a devotional artist to get that kind of work, and just. The church left me cold. I like faerie tales. They're wild, and real, and they don't have so many rules in them. Every so often the Winter Hymn tries to ban them, but..." 

She shrugs. "Stories don't die so easily."

First a soft smile at the pretty description, then Sable's expression sours a bit at the restrictions, then brightens at the faerie tales, and finally a wickedly fierce grin.

"No. No, they don't."

She takes another sip of her cocoa.

"I love faerie tales, and wilder and weirder stories in general. I understand why people try to censor things like that, but," a pause, a breath, that fierce grin again, "people are as much story as we are substance, and we crave stories like we do water."

Sip.

"What are your favorites?"

"Well, there's one about a kingdom that's frozen in time, I based the card art off that, and there's one about changelings that I really relate to, and there's the Earth classics - you know, Loki and the farmer's daughter, Hades and Persephone, Raven Steals The Sun..." 

She stirs her shake around with her straw. "There's a lot of ones I don't know, still. I have a couple big omnibuses of Earth legends, but the stuff from the Trades and the rest of the OTC's network hasn't really reached me yet, I don't know what's quality."

A wistful sigh slips out of Sable's lips as she listens to Pigeon list off fable, and she smiles warmly.

"Oh, tales of Loki, and Hades and Persephone, are some of my very favorites. There's a very nice reimagining of Persephone and Hades that I quite like. I don't think I've heard either of the first two though, and now you've definitely piqued my curiosity." Her tails start swishing excitedly.

"The frozen kingdom is like a twist on Sleeping Beauty, only with an entire kingdom preserved in a single moment, awaiting the return of Mother Midnight from her imprisonment in a glass clock; her daughter, Dawn, is the only one who can return her from her enchanted sleep with a spelled winding-key, but Dawn and Midnight can never meet, so the kingdom is captured in eternal twilight - until finally Sun and Moon take pity, and provide an eclipse, and in that moment of midnight and dawn in the middle of the day the enchantment is broken and mother and daughter finally embrace. There are other variations, where Midnight and Dawn are sisters or lovers, and with Sun and Moon taking larger or smaller roles. Often there's a twilight ball - Sun and Dawn are often lovers, Sun and Moon sisters or lovers... The approved version is Grandfather Moon and Grandmother Sun and Mother Midnight and Daughter Dawn, but I like the ones where there's some romance to it, especially between Midnight and Dawn because I really wish I had someone waiting for me, like that..." 

She pinkens. "Um. Forget I said that."

A gentle, contented smile slips onto Sable's face as she listens.

"Oh, that's lovely," she coos, when Pigeon finishes. "And I agree, it definitely sounds better to me if I imagine it with romance. Oh but which way? Mm, Sun and Dawn being lovers sounds so simple. Yes, they're both light, good good. Sun and Moon, and Midnight and Dawn, those pairings sound much more interesting, especially Midnight and Dawn. Mm, and that's nothing to be embarrassed about. There's something so very tender about the idea. They're waiting, chasing each other around the clock, one frozen and the other wishing she could help properly, each trapped by her own circumstance until things align and they can be free to love each other properly. It's delightful. Mmm, both perspectives really tug my heartstrings, too. I think I relate most to Dawn, ever chasing but never reaching, but they're both a mood in different ways."

She sighs tenderly, smiling and blushing a little.

"... I usually imagine myself as Dawn, too. She's the heroine, after all. Midnight is also kind of a mood because she's - trapped, you know - but she's usually portrayed as older and wiser and that's just not me. Moon is also fun, since she ultimately provides the eclipse that gives Dawn her chance to unlock the clock, but usually she's in a very boring pairing - Sun, or rarely Midnight in versions where Sun is a villain. I've never seen her paired with Dawn. Which is a little weird, since the moon and the dawn can coexist, you know? That's just a real astronomical fact."

"It's true! I've seen it with my own eyes, even!" She giggles. "And wow, I did not expect there would be one where Sun is a villain, but it fits so wonderfully and it's the sort of trope that's done far too rarely — the bright, searing light chasing the cozy shadows away."

She looks down at her cocoa again, blushing. "But, um. I... Thinking of Dawn in terms of being the heroine actually makes her feel like less of a fit, honestly. I suppose it should've been obvious, Dawn being the heroine is the proper pattern, but I got stuck on thinking of Moon as the heroine, 'cause she makes the eclipse possible. Dawn fits me if I think of her story in terms of a futile struggle until Moon saves the day, but once I consider it in terms of Dawn being the heroine who just needed a helping hand then it's obvious I'm not like her at all. Much closer to Midnight, my contributions needing to be unlocked by someone else running the code I write."

She takes long sip of her drink, a bittersweet expression on her face.

"Dawn generally has to convince Sun and Moon to help her, they're usually more ambiguous than heroic. Sometimes Midnight can still convey messages through the glass case and she advises Dawn on what to do, that does sound like it could be you. There's a lot of different Dawns, but the ones I like work together with everyone to ultimately triumph. In the bad ones she's kind of a spoiled brat who just insists that she get what she wants and the sun and moon literally move for her, like seriously who writes a story like that?"

"Authoritarians who hate fun, probably," Sable wrinkles her nose. "What a way to try to ruin such a tender and heartfelt tale."

"The Dawns who work to unite everyone's contributions together sound really right," she adds, her expression softening again. "And yeah, that Midnight sounds like a pretty good fit."

"It's such a lovely story. I should try to find a copy." She reaches to pull her phone from her purse, then freezes.

"Oh, I'd love to read one of the really good versions with your art alongside it. I... could I keep these?" she asks, gesturing at the cards with a bright violet blush coloring her pale cheeks. "And could you help me pick out a particularly romantic version of the tale?"

"You can..." 

She pauses for a long moment. 

"... you can keep those if you let me sign them. And I would have to dig for the best one that would be most appropriate for you - I know which one I like best, but..." 

She blushes brighter and slides the cards across the table, dipping her hand in her purse to pull out an elegant black fountain pen with an amethyst inlay on the barrel, then she passes that to Pigeon as well.

She looks at the pen and blinks. "Gosh, that's pretty high-quality for a - technical person - where'd you get that pen?"

"Oh! Um, there's a little stationery shop on Arcbright that caters to mages of various sorts called Miscast Missives that a coworker introduced me to. I've kinda been on a handwriting kick for most of the past year."

"Cute." Pigeon smiles. "I mostly work with digital media, though, so I don't know how to use a fountain pen. Let me get something out of the console."

Sable blushes some more, nodding. Pigeon thinks she's cute!?

Pigeon taps at the tablet, and a pink ballpoint pen appears on the table, a glittery gel coat cushioning the base where it's held. She clicks it out into writing position and starts signing the cards. 

"... so Sable, um... what do you like least about the OTC?"

"Oh, hm! Good question. Probably the cultural losses when we empty some hellworlds, things that nobody takes the time to figure out how to recreate separate from the awful places they came from."