Throne Procurement · Vys Division
Procurement Requests Transfer of File SK-17. “To Someone Else. Anyone Else.”
From the Consolidated Acquisition File, excerpted without improvement
Four years. Four reward figures issued for the apprehension of one fourteen-year-old resident of Lower Vys — of which, the file records in a hand that has given up, three have been collected by the subject herself, under four names, none of them hers, one of them the Division's.
The standing orders now read as follows: the subject is not to be pursued indoors; the subject is not to be allowed within reach of anything load-bearing, anything locked, anything carrying current, or anything the Division would be sorry to lose. Field officers note, drily, that this describes most of Vys.
The public bounty is withdrawn. In the margin of the file, in a second hand, an unidentified officer has written the only question four years of procurement never attempted: “She is fourteen. Has anyone tried asking her what she wants?” No reply is recorded.
No journal by her exists in the archive — she would object to this newspaper on principle. The Journals section composes an entry in her attested voice, and labels it as one. Voices of Vaïma →
The Picture Palace
Fifty-Two Years of Light: The Lumies Hold the Empire
From the Lumie Quarter, Vys — where the Reality Theater is one of forty-eight venues
They call them lumies, ghost shows, phantom plays, air stories — and in Kivarro, among the traditionally minded, the Final Nail in the Coffin of Proper Dramatic Arts. By any name: light, projected into performance, flawless and identical and immortal, replaying what it captured. The Empire's dominant medium since about 7042, in the early and Golden Age register of the picture palaces.
The founding picture remains Red Dust Redemption (7061) — Wastes weird-western, supernatural horror, and a time-loop, fused before anyone had words for the fusion. The reigning face is Callista Vorn, the era's most celebrated lumie performer, who lived in projected-image anonymity until a public malfunction briefly revealed her true one.
The Picture Palace section — programmes, billing, and reviews — opens soon.
The Paper Bird Post
Fold, Inscribe, Release: Wing Mail at 2,274 Years
The Imperial Correspondence Network — Wing Mail, Fold-and-Fly, Whispering Wings — still runs on whisperwillow paper, crystal dust, and essence of direction. The fold is the service: the Swift for urgent word, low capacity; the Dove for personal correspondence, which sometimes arrives bearing small flowers gathered along the journey; the Hawk for official notices, summonses, and tax demands, known for its persistence in finding recipients who would really rather not be found.
The Service does not discuss the Great Mail Strike of 6970, when over ninety percent of the Empire's paper birds refused to deliver tax notices. The birds, for their part, have never apologised.
Letters & Paper Birds — the section of correspondence, self-writing letters, and the Parade of Secrets — opens soon.
Voices of Vaïma
The Journals — kept in turns, surrendered to the archive, opened here.
- Forc — “I just want to see how it comes apart.”
- Professor Birb — yesterday's organizational paradigm has been TRANSCENDED.
- Dr. Rhama — from the private notebooks: a person is a ∮.
- Ivy — expelled twice in one day; a personal best.
- RJB III — the sand-pearls, recounted at luncheon.
- Adam Mann — a regular fella, keeping a journal like one.
Open the Journals →
Society
Berkmountain Notes
R.J. Berkmountain III passed under us on Foursday, upriver-bound on the Prospect, with a party. Aboard, the sand-pearls anecdote was recounted. We have now recorded this anecdote at this table four times in six years. The pearls do not change. The fellow does not change. It has, at this point, the quality of a devotion.
His daughter has declined the season entirely, dismissed her chaperone, and is reliably reported to be buying maps of the Sabast shore. Not the town. The shore. The striped sand. She was also seen on the Mid-Span, on Sixesday. Buying rope.
Both keep journals, after a fashion. Voices of Vaïma →
Notices
NIGHT WORK UNDERTAKEN. Watching, minding, sitting-up-with. I do not sleep and see no reason the hours should be wasted. Reasonable. References cheerfully given and entirely unverifiable. — A. MANN, Brokebridge.
Weather
Sabast: a little gloom.
It improves the climate. — per Cadet Berkmountain IV, on the record, without remorse
Songs of the Empire
Heard in the Cabinet
“How It Comes Apart,” in the subject's own voice: They gave me a number. I gave me a name — Forc. Also in rotation: “A Regular Human Man,” a torch-song of self-introduction; “A to Zero”; and the Latch Song, whose litany raises Saint Ivy whether she attends or not.
The Songs section — the Resonance Cabinet's Vaïma, words and workings — opens soon.