How far apart are people? Is this place busy enough she can try to fade away into a crowd, or sparse enough she can avoid being seen by anyone at all?

Actually, if she looks into that kitchen, are there any convenient windows leading to outside?

There don't appear to be any outdoor windows in the kitchen.

Inconveniently, the place is indeed in that range between fade-into-the-crowd and sparse-enough-no-one-is-looking.

No one particularly seems to be watching the kitchen area, though.

Probably her best bet is to just go for it, all casual-like. If she can make it out onto the street, then she can fade into the crowd there.

It takes her a moment to work up the courage to go for it, but she manages it. This is important! Alard's freedom is at stake! She can't afford to be cowardly!

And she walks, calmly, just quickly and purposefully enough to make it look like she has someplace to be. The determined face can stay inside, the outside world can see a not-quite-bored facial expression that says that whatever she has to do, she's done it sixteen times before.

And she pays very close attention to any minds she passes by, not drilling into them but merely paying very close attention to the light impressions she gets off of them when she isn't pushing. She should be able to spot any sense of recognition in anyone's mind quickly enough.

Nothing stops her.

The street outside is wide and busy, with throngs of pedestrians and the occasional tramcar.

It's not a straight shot all the way to the Inquisitorium from here, but it's close.

And off she goes! As far as anyone should be concerned, she's just one more unremarkable girl in the crowd.

That's what she tells herself, at least.

There is still a dragon on the roof of the Inquisitorium, looking kind of miserable in its cage.

The entrance is open to the public, but the lobby is guarded by men in armor, with half a dozen sets of heavy iron doors leading further into the fortress. There is nothing so convenient as a receptionist, but one set of iron doors is propped open, and leads to an area filled with desks and people. The guards on that door have their helmets open, and one of them is currently gently rebuffing a matronly woman who seems very concerned that her neighbor is stealing her laundry.

Hey, laundry theft is a genuine problem! It's really easy to get away with and it makes perfect sense that someone might not have the money to replace her stolen clothing and would try to get the inquisitors involved to solve the problem! But, uh, also that's not really any of her business.

Christa will wait a moment to see if the matronly woman's business gets dealt with quickly. She doesn't want to interrupt!

The guard on the door is patiently trying to explain that laundry theft is a matter for civil court, not the Inquisitors.

The other guard on that door spots Christa waiting and asks, "Good day, miss. What brings you here?"

When Christa hears the bit about civil court she feels very silly. She should have remembered that!

But now she is being talked to! And so she must answer!

"Um, I've been missing for a bit, and I think people think I'm dead, and I wanted to make sure nobody got in trouble about that, given the bit where I'm still alive?"

The guard frowns, not taking her seriously quite yet, but expressing concern.

"Why would anyone think you're dead, miss?"

"Um. I sort of got kidnapped from a dragon's enclosure after a date. And my clothes got left behind. And, um, I think people might have made the obvious guesses about why they were there and I wasn't."

"What's your name, miss?"

"Christa Lens."

The guard stares at her for a long moment.

He points at her. "Wait there."

He turns and strides into the offices, making a beeline for an area further in.

He returns shortly, with another man wearing an impatient frown and rank epaulets on his shoulders. He gets Christa to repeat her name. He has Truesight, and can verify she's not lying.

Then he ushers her in through the doors and starts shouting orders, sending several other inquisitors running off to do various things.

"My name is Sylar Gadiga, Miss Christa. Please come with me. We will need you to provide a full statement."

Christa follows, suddenly feeling rather a lot more nervous. 

The interrogation room Sylar takes Christa into is a plain stone room with a small barred window in one wall, a small wooden table, a chair, and a small wooden stool. It is one of the nicer ones, right off the main chamber, and the stool is padded.

Sylar brings paper and a smoke pen (it writes by precisely burning the paper, more for looking impressive than being optimal as a writing implement, though it has the benefit of not needing ink and not being smudgeable) which he sets on the table before sitting across from Christa.

He asks her to recount the complete set of events that transpired between her meeting Alard and her walking into the Inquisitorium.

Christa actually rehearsed just what she should say if she got someone with truesight! Of if she didn't, since grabbing someone with it to ask her later if she'd lied was a pretty obvious thing for them to do.

She does not, actually, intend to tell him everything. The group that rescued her was well-intentioned, she thinks, and did, in fact, rescue her. She's just decided that rescuing Alard is more important than being rescued. Aire can just portal her off somewhere if the Lord Commander does decide to get blackmaily about it. But she does tell him everything that might be important for keeping people safe; that's what he might ask if she did later, she thinks. And she makes sure not to lie, that's obvious enough not to be worth thinking about, really.

She goes over her and Alard's date, although not in detail. And what happened after. How she knew Yui was suffering because of her use of telepathy earlier in the day to distract it during a stealthcraft exercise, and how she decided that made it her responsibility to, um, relieve Yui's urges. Alard felt it wasn't, but it was her fault Yui was uncomfortable in the first place, so it just made sense that she should help.

And then she fell asleep, and woke up somewhere else.

Kidnapping was maybe a poor way to phrase it? The person who grabbed her didn't ask permission, but she was, um, unconscious at the time, and they probably couldn't have woken her up if they'd tried, she was, um, tired. After the whole thing with Yui. And they were nice, and she's a telepath so she knows they weren't being dishonest about it. But, um, they thought Alard had made Yui rape her, which really makes the whole "grabbing her suddenly without stopping to explain" make a lot more sense.

Eventually she was told what was going on, that people thought she'd been eaten and raped by Yui. And from how they were talking she could tell the person who'd grabbed her also thought the whole rape thing. Then she decided to go out and make sure that everyone knew that actually Yui and Alard were innocent. She didn't think they'd let her go, they were worried about her safety, and their thoughts made it seem like they wouldn't believe her if she explained what actually happened, so she said she had to go to the bathroom and just left while they weren't paying attention.

Christa has a terrible sense of direction, so when she says she couldn't figure out how to get back there if she tried, she isn't actually lying.

Sylar scribbles down notes as she speaks, watching her with a neutral expression. The faint scent of singed paper fills the air.

When she gets to the part about 'taking responsibility' for the aroused dragon, Sylar makes something of a face, though he does not interrupt her. Then he makes an entirely different face and slashes at another sheet of paper, writing something down in harsh strokes, grumbling something about this being why they should be allowed to use Telepathy even on royal suspects. (Of course there's a law about that. Of course the nobility would be more worried about concealing guilt than concealing innocence.)

At the rest of the story, Sylar listens even more intently. Christa just revealed the involvement of yet another player in this drama, and that's new and important information beyond Alard's apparent innocence.

When Christa finishes speaking, Sylar finishes writing on that second sheet of paper, signs his name, and then sticks his head out of the interrogation room briefly to summon another inquisitor to take the written orders. Then he returns and sits back down across from Christa.

He asks about the 'helpful' kidnappers. He wants to know every detail Christa can recall.

Um. Every detail? They were, um, well. Some things went on that were. Maybe not the kind of thing a girl should be telling a stranger about? She's already mentioned the dragon thing, but that's all she did! She didn't give him details. 

Probably he doesn't mean every detail that way. She can just, um, mention things. Or maybe not? He probably won't ask if she leaves that stuff out. And if she does, well, it's embarrassing, and that's an understandable enough reason for her not to mention it, she thinks.

Christa will tell him some more things, then. Her memories of a lot of it are sort of hazy. They seemed to have a large communal area that people could relax in, and that's where she spent all of her time before she left. Maybe they were trying to make sure she wasn't alone? She got a bit of a sense of that, from what she read off of them. She remembers two people taking care of her at one point, making sure she was comfortable. Then later only one person, a woman ended up taking care of her, making sure she was safe and well-looked-after. The people had a range of ages, but more of them seemed young than old. She spent most of her time there sleeping, she didn't really have the opportunity to learn much. She wishes she could tell him more (true, but in a different way than he's likely to interpret things). Part of her sense of genuine helpfulness is in the way that she just sort of walked out after she went to the restroom. She wasn't, like, guarded or imprisoned or anything.

She never actually learned how they grabbed her, she was asleep when it happened, and nobody ever explained or thought about it where she could hear.

Um, there were couches in the room? They were made of leather? She wishes she had more information about things, but she spent most of her time asleep and then later spent it thinking up a way she could go without people deciding she was a traumatized girl going off to try to support the person who'd traumatized her.

Sylar smiles, and thanks her. She has nothing to worry about. The case against Alard will surely be dropped. And then he tells her that this might be a very important matter and that he's going to give her some time to think hard and see if she can remember anything more about these people she was with.

(Sylar is not an incompetent. He can tell that the girl his hiding something. He can see the pattern of facts she's not telling him. It is a rather suspicious negative space. This is the freaky slut who just cheerfully confessed to dragonfucking. If she's got something she does want to hide, it must be worse than even that. She seems like the earnest type, though. A little time to sweat and she might come clean.)

Sylar steps out of the room, and shuts the door, leaving Christa inside alone with only a promise to come check on her in an hour. To see if she's remembered anything more.

Christa is sort of scared, as the waiting goes on. But she decided to leave and clear Alard's name despite the fact that she's apparently putting herself at more than a little risk from the Lord-Commander by doing so. She can deal with a little more fear. She's been afraid ever since she decided to leave the sanctum.

She could read in his mind that he thought she was hiding something. Not much else, he's a bit difficult for her telepathy to get a hold on. And, well, she was hiding something. She won't come clean on all of it, but she can admit the thing that's personally embarrassing but not damaging to her rescuers. And then hopefully he'll be satisfied.

When he returns, she tells him that she didn't tell him something, because she was embarrassed. After she woke up, she slept with some of the people who thought they "rescued" her. The bit where she slept with them isn't the embarrassing bit, but it was a distraction and she fell back asleep afterwards and she didn't even bother to ask the time. She feels terrible about the way that left Alard and Yui imprisoned for longer than they should have been. She was having fun while innocents were suffering for crimes they didn't commit, and all because she didn't have the presence of mind to wonder whether there might be negative consequences to her vanishing. And then there's her friend Annabelle, who must have been so worried. She should have realized that probably a bunch of time had passed while she was sleeping earlier. Which, um, means it might be sort of her fault that the Inquisitors had to do a bunch of work. She thinks. She's not really sure about what time everything was happening, due to the fuzz. Or, um, how many days she's been gone, actually. She still doesn't know how long she was asleep before the first time she woke up. But probably that delayed her turning up safe by a while?

She's sorry.

(She has been feeling mortified about that ever since she finished escaping from the sanctum. And it was, actually, part of the reason why she didn't share some of that stuff with him. And she is sorry. She hasn't lied once.)

Hasn't lied, but...

It's subtle, but this is literally Sylar's job, noticing subtleties. She's still carefully avoiding the identifying information he wants. She's protecting someone.

Sus.

Good thing Sylar spent the last hour stacking the deck in his own favor.

Sylar sets a new document on the table in front of Christa. It is an indictment of one Christa Lens, charging her with one count of deviant-promiscuity. An old law. Sylar had to look it up. But still on the books. Punishment for a first-time offender is ten lashes to the buttocks followed by expulsion from the city limits.

Now, Sylar himself would rather look the other way. Punishing Christa's life choices is not worth the paperwork. But rules are rules, and he'll have to do that paperwork after all... unless Christa gives him something more important to do. Then he could easily just forget to file the indictment, since he'd be so busy.

Christa takes a moment to process what's going on here. It doesn't look like he's an honestly concerned person who thinks she's just confused about something. Threatening people doesn't make sense in response to that. It looks like he wants to know more about the people who grabbed her, and the fact that she's said she's a telepath who can tell they're nice wasn't enough to stop him from deciding that ruining a girl's life over it is perfectly reasonable. 

If there's people out there who don't do anything bad and just occasionally get confused and rescue girls who weren't raped by dragons, this isn't actually something the inquisitors need to know. He hasn't asked if she's covering for something important. For all he knows she's just covering for more dragonfucking. She would understand if he'd asked if she was keeping anything important secret and she'd refused to answer. Then it would make sense! It still wouldn't be good, but it would make sense.

But no. He just noticed she wasn't giving him all the information he might want, and didn't bother to check whether the information might be worth hurting someone over before he decided to skip straight to the hurting.

This isn't what the inquisitors were like in the books she read growing up.

But. Threatening people Christa cares about is the least effective way to get her to do something. She's already decided to take the much larger risk of the Lord-Commander deciding to blackmail and eventually kill her over being close to his son, and all that for one person and one dragon. She's not going to flinch from something like this, with so many more people's lives at stake.

She wishes she'd told him less.

She has no evil people to point him at. And she won't point him at good ones just to keep herself safe.

He can file the indictment. 

Sylar gives her a knowing, slightly condescending, nod.

"Tell you what, Miss Christa. If you can clearly state to me that there are no other facts about your abductors that would be of any interest to me or to the law of Arcadia, I'll tear this up and we can both get on with our day."

He looms over her.

"Can you?"