<em>The Deck</em><br/><br/>Colleen looked to the captain before answering. "Martira Bay," she began to recall, equally distant as Baykur recalled the Common tongue, "Is a dreadful place. Those who live there are touched by a soulless magic, and it drives them mad. Great edifaces cage that madness in guilds and gentleman's clubs devoted to some perversion or another. It was no place to be young, competing to tour these disturbed private hells by moonlight. Twice revolution came while I lived there, and in places the moldering dead joined the brickwork."<br/><br/>Captain Baykur only surveiled the story from afar, and processed Colleen's words through a filter of half-forgotten language, perhaps. It settled on her at last like warm tea, and the way it ended seemed to please.<br/>"Doctor Heinfroth came to the island after the war. She made to live there, and made her home into..." The name came to Baykur purely phonetically: "The Asylum for the Mentally Disturbed."<br/><br/><div class="spoiler_container"><div class="spoiler_header" onclick="hideSecond (this);" role="button">Jacqueline's History</div><div class="spoiler_body">The name Heinfroth struck Jacqueline as a mainlander name, probably somewhere within the landlocked and black-forested Core. Nothing more sprang to mind.</div></div><br/><br/>"I told you. When Doctor Rehner is aboard, it means we carry patients from the mainland," Baykur reiterated, word for word.<br/>"Many are mad there," said Colleen.<br/>"Patients are given to Heinfroth's care, so their madness can be treated away from everything. In peace. The<em>Mercy's </em>mission is to take them without incident."<br/>Captain Baykur flung open the aftercastle doors, ready to return to deck and distance herself from all of these questions. "I leave you in Colleen's care," she said. "Stay out of the crew's way."<br/><br/><em>The Store Room</em><br/><br/>"Not too hot," Michelle agreed, as Corinne's hand settled on her pink skin.<br/><br/>Margaret Hotspur watched the three negotiate and intertwine like figures in a painting.<br/>"I avoided the saloon, on the<em>Charlotte," </em>Margaret said. "I expected the nerves would flee me once we arrived on the white beaches. But there is no escaping one's nature- I went for the Society of Antiquity and would surely carry on that work unerring, refusing distraction by the likes of our friend Michelle, until our fleeting time in paradise was at an end."<br/><br/>"On that eve, perhaps, I would indulge the liquor with a sudden sense of urgency. There was ever a plan somewhere in my mind for a spontaneous tryst which I dared not conceive where or by whom, for fear of being complicit. I knew of it, the lascivious nature of the<em>Charlotte's </em>journey. Each of us are..."<br/>Margaret lost her train of thought, in Aloisa's eyes.<br/><br/>Beside her, Sage dropped into Aloisa's lap, and indeed forced one into being. Hips fulsome and hot did wonders to warm, and Sage's hands pressed back slouched shoulders. She was not there to ease the tension from Aloisa's muscles.<br/>"You will see me home safely, won't you Lady?" Sage implored, so breathy the sound of it transformed the energy between she and Aloisa. "Whisper in my ear how I might show my appreciation, and it will become our secret."<br/><br/>Zoe moved, between Corinne's thighs. Small movements, finding legs with her hands and rubbing warmth into them. She needed to keep track of Michelle in her periphery, that playful flit of white hair, and her eyes went wide with the effort.<br/>"What other games do you play with magic?" Michelle asked.<br/><br/>The door opened a crack, and Doctor Rehner returned. There was a moment, tongue firmly set in her cheek, drinking in the atmosphere of the store room and the huddled giggling breaths. Without a sense of privacy, the doctor opened her physician's bag on an improvised plank examining table.<br/>"You look very warm now. Who is first?"