Two Crows Watch from the Gallows Tree (part 17)

(Basically, fish on the left are one species, fish on the right are a different species. People have been arguing (passively, no one gives that many fucks lol) for the past hundred years whether they’re one species or two. I collected a ton of molecular data and demonstrated they are in fact two species. Also cleaned up the distribution map of where each one is located ^^) (does me spending two years of my life on this stop cocky men from trying to mansplain my thesis to me? No. So people still argue with me. But I’m right. And a lot of people believe me lol I have a lot of data to support my claims)

(Wanna skip, then? I’m honestly not coming up with a ton)

(That's so fucking cool dude
That's like
Actual scientist shit
And they do look different, physically)

(Yeah we can skip, where to?)

(Aw thanks! I’m pretty proud of it ^^ I got a publication out of it. Tbf the pigmentation is wildly different across their range and I actually argue that’s a bad metric for telling the species apart in the field lol but these are pretty clean representations of the ‘ideal’ of each species. I think they’re pretty cute! Teeny little feeshy frens)
(I say now, two years removed. Leading up to my defense I was referring to them as ‘pez pinocha’ which roughly translates to ‘cunt fish’ in Spanish because they’re from middle America and pissed me off lmao)

(Hmm good question. Does anything else need to happen before Zander gets there? Michael be an asshat? Anyone interrogate her about last night? Etc)

(That's fucking superb; you were allowed to name them?)

(I don't think Michael will surface, like. Gaius will get the locks changed and might ask her a few questions after her recovers but it's mostly about what the guy looked like and could he touch the rune bone)

(Oh, sorry, no lol just colloquially, as one does. They were already named before, I just got to tell people to stop pretending like the second species doesn’t exist lol like people keep publishing studies and are like “these are all the species in this genus” and just completely ignoring the ones on the right. So my thesis was originally going to be a small scale study on that species alone because no one has worked on it and then we realized that genus is a fucking mess and expanded lol)

(And oki I will leave it up to you then if we rp that out or not. She’s going to lie about what he looked like and pretend like she has no idea who it was, meanwhile she’s going to sleep basically none over the course of the next week or so to the point of dozing off in her daily life. She’ll probably avoid her room like the plague despite the new lock and be pretending that everything is okay and just shut everyone out. She’s still big mad at Sera lol
Or we could skip ahead to Zander’s arrival? I imagine the men would want to meet briefly before the girls are involved?)

(Ohhh)

(I think we can get away with not rping that. We can do Zander's arrival now I believe!)

(Off we go!)

Zander made good time. He’d given Derik a few days heads up so Derik could get a message to Gaius and, hopefully, be ready for him. He went straight to the Keep. He felt like he was eighty years old with how stiff and frozen he was. He’d not taken his time getting back.

The gates opened for him, and Gaius was notified. He'd had Derik brought to the Keep as well, and now he was waiting in his office.

Zander greeted the soldiers warmly and quickly ended up at Gaius’s door, hanging back to let his guard announce him. As he expected, this little revelation hadn’t seemed to inspire Gaius’s confidence in him.

The guard knocked, then opened the door.
Gaius sat where he usually sat, minus the crutch. The week before, the prosthesis designer had come with the new leg, which he now wore. It was an elegant oak leg carved to look like twisting roots on the thigh and calves, and it was hinged at the knee to allow him to walk. He had his old cane back, but it had been so much easier to walk to the point that it brought him to tears the first time he tried.

“Gaius!” Zander strode in with a smile, though he looked tired and tense. “Good to see you again. How are you?”

"I'm well." He rose to shake Zander's hand. "Thank you for getting here so quickly; I hope your trip was safe and productive?'

Zander shook his hand firmly. “It went as well as could be hoped for, given the circumstances.”

"Certainly." He dipped his head and gestured to a chair. "Please, sit."

Zander nodded, which drew his eye to Gaius’s leg. He glanced at it, eyebrows shooting up in surprise, then sat down. “…how’s that working out for you? Less pain, I hope?”