text: > look around
  The margins are not a stable place to live, but there are plenty of people passing through and they're all in need of something. This place supplies it: food, potable water, first aid, doss space, amateur legal counsel, trauma debriefing. Physically it's a low-ceilinged, broad, poorly-lit room, somewhere between bar, mess-hall and doss-house, with what would be a comfortable, homey scent if you liked fish soup, damp clothes and ill-washed foreigners.
  
  A particularly sorry-looking outclade, huddled over a bowl of Complimentary Soup, is the only customer.
  
  > Note 7
  By its nature, few of the Cafe's clientele have or even understand money; Druse is mostly paid in low-end elfboons. He hopes, or says that he hopes, to eventually accumulate enough boons to be able to go home, once the war's over; but boons don't stack in a neat numerical fashion, and you have only the vaguest idea as to whether this is a credible ambition.
  
  > Note 8
  See Moondarkling Volume La Zeroiene: Witchlighten.
  
  > examine Soup
  Outclades can straggle in in any number and at all hours, including the numerous ones in which Druse doesn't want to cook; but they they're often cold and hungry. And freight orders don't make it out here very reliably. The solution is the Complimentary Soup, an oversized, eternally simmering crockpot containing a sort of high-class pigswill. It receives most of the fruits of Druse's sporadic hunter-gathering; on bad days the major ingredient is barnacles, and although its flavour evolves over the years it always retains a basic fishy character.
  
  > eat Soup
  You already ate. You try to make a point of it, if you plan to show up at a non-cooking hour. It's not that the Soup is invariably bad, but it's rarely very good and often outright awful, and there is no way to tell until you've swallowed the first spoonful.
  
  (first taking the Complimentary Soup)
  That's hardly portable.
  
  > examine the outclade
  Piercingly beautiful, even for an elf. Age indefinite; she doesn't move with the assured arrogance of a mature adult, but then she's probably had a deflating few days. Somewhat damp, muddy and scratched.
  
  Various details -- left forearm scarified in triple spirals, a particular style of weaving spidersilk ribbons into braided hair, a really expensive bra -- identify her as a member of the Ae Cau Shar clade. You only know this because they test you on the entire freakin" Aelfosemiotica every couple of years; the Ae Cau Shar are not, to the best of your limited knowledge, very closely affected by the conflict. Kicker is, they only speak their own obscure language, and occasionally Middling Forkmouth, which works as something like a regional trade-jargon for elves but is fearsomely unlearnable for humans[9].
  
  > About you
  Your Ruritanian passport calls you Zbyana Ostrava Kalinin-Zorndorf, and your parents call you something similar with different phonetics. The elves are notoriously sloppy about both paperwork and nomenclature, but a plurality of them would acknowledge you as Comtessa Radishes,  Starlight Through Frozen Waterfalls, Lord High Weatherstone of the Hollow Hill, and Dawn-cobwebs Musketeer[10].
  
  Your outfit was constructed around a camel trenchcoat, an extremely French scarf, and the World's Stupidest Boots.[11]
  
  > Note 9
  Which is suspiciously convenient for anybody who might have a motive to avoid the challenges of interrogation, hem-hem.[12]
  
  > Note 12
  C.E.J. Pacian, Gun Mute, talking to.[13]
  
  > Note 13
  Adam Thornton, Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis, opening screen. Believe it or not, I was abusing footnotes before I even fired Stiffy up, but the encouragement is appreciated.
  
  > Note 10
  And several others that you're not allowed to disclose, one or two that you are literally incapable of disclosing, and a whole host that are best left unshared in polite company. Turning down elf-boon names is Not Done, but it would be a lot easier if they weren't such a bunch of pervs.
  
  > Note 11
  By inclination you think about clothes perhaps four times a year, but elves have an intense cultural prejudice against anyone not ridiculously overdressed. Most patrollers default to something gothy and heroin-chic on the grounds that it can be sustained with little sleep and less laundry, but it's become such a staple of the patroller stereotype that you resisted. Fortunately, even the Ruritanian Liminal Patrol maintains a stylist on staff.
  
  > Sing
  Your singing is abominable.
  
  Well, shit. Now you have to work out what to do with her. There's no chance that she has a clade sponsor, because she doesn't have a clade. Which also means that she'd be outside even what passes for a social safety-net in the refugee camps. And if the Ae Cau Shar aren't actually in the war, asylum is going to be a whole lot harder to come by even if she gets to the head of the queue, which she won't. So your choices, essentially, are to arrest her and consign her to a muddy limbo for the rest of her natural life, or turn a blind eye, let her wander off into the countryside and get arrested by rural police instead, or stoned by a Landnat gang, or abducted. Or deport her, to whatever was scary enough to make all this seem worthwhile.
  
  > Arrest outclade
  It's one hell of a rough deal, but she's probably headed in this direction anyway, and you can at least make the process more gentle than the provincial police are likely to. And it's not the Landnats.
  
  It takes a while to convey the idea to her, but after some emphatic gestures at the door and tugging at the wrist she gets it, arches an impeccable eyebrow, and looks even more tired than before. You shepherd her to the nearest branch of the Outsider Office, stick around to make sure they don't fuck up the paperwork or mess her around, and leave her your card. Not that she understands phones.
  Back at headquarters, you crunch out a  report. Krebs nods noncomittally over it, and it gets filed, and you go home. You stare
  fixedly at the doormat for about ten minutes, and then you go about your life, not quite trying to forget, not quite trying to remember.
  
  > kiss her
  She's cute and everything, but that side of yourself goes mysteriously unmentioned until Volume La Soixieme: Shadowed Wings, and a good two-fifths of the fans still refuse to regard that as canon.
  
  > shoot the outclade
  I beg your pardon?
  
  > Inventory
  You are carrying:
  the Nook of Shadows.
  semi-automatic
  
  > exit
  Today it's the verge of a mangrove swamp, water the colour of strong tea lapping gently against a barnacle-encrusted jetty, and far off through the trees the suggestion of blazing light on a foreign sea. Something rubbery rolls below the water's surface, then is gone; the air is warm, with a strong taste of salt, lemon zest and rotting mud.
  
  The Margin Cafe looks no more weatherbeaten than usual, and the prospect of cooler air is enticing. Or you could just get out of here.
  
  The mudlark is engaged in hunting what may very well be fleas, though around here you never know.
  
  > go inside
  The margins are not a stable place to live, but there are plenty of people passing through and they're all in need of something. This place supplies it: food, potable water, first aid, doss space, amateur legal counsel, trauma debriefing. Physically it's a low-ceilinged, broad, poorly-lit room, somewhere between bar, mess-hall and doss-house, with what would be a comfortable, homey scent if you liked fish soup, damp clothes and ill-washed foreigners.
  
  A particularly sorry-looking outclade, huddled over a bowl of Complimentary Soup, is the only customer.
  
  > look up the outclade in Nook
  Unsurprisingly, she doesn't show up in any records. At all. Anywhere. Which makes sense: if she had crossed over before, she'd probably have done a better job of it this time.
  
  > look up yourself in Nook
  Whenever you try to egosearch yourself, the Nook of Shadows just plays back the vision you had in the final act of Moondarkling: Dancing Whispers that revealed you to be the sole descendant of the half-elfin heroine Joan of Arc and, therefore, destined to protect both humanity and elfkind through a vaguely-defined and ever-expanding array of powers and prophecies. There's a pointlessly ambiguous coda about the identity of your true love (also destined). It looks a lot less impressive in 2D.
  
  > look up the mudlark in Nook
  Using magic to obtain information about legal residents or legitimate visitors without a warrant or documented consent is horribly illegal throughout the EU, except under conditions of direct threat[14]. Even if you're just using the magic to remotely access Google. You could get in an awful lot of trouble doing this...
  
  > Note 14
  You can scry for someone's psych records if they're waving a gun at you. You can't remotely view someone's home if you think they're building a bomb.