<div class="floatleft">(https://i.pinimg.com/564x/c4/a2/eb/c4a2eb3622a5fd5f4149b8e094a22fa3.jpg)</div><strong>Name:</strong>Danae Vine-Lott (https://ddb.ac/characters/13428552/TAFm5K)<br/><strong>Location: </strong>Hidden Cellar, Cosmopolis Club, Martira Bay<br/><strong>Wearing: </strong>Captain's uniform<br/><br/>In Martira Bay Danae had learned the fragility of truth, self, and memory.  Truth compassed the unknowable and that which the sane mind could not wish to know - it was no virtue, but the end of the world.  The self could be sublimated in instrumentality, and it was the task that then took the form of being, and the agent was forgotten, forever subordinated to the action.  Memory, of course, was a brittle thing, a false prophetess.  There was comfort, doubtless, to wear the porcelain mask and to embrace oblivion.<br/><br/>The newest inmates for the bedlam had regarded her with a kind of heavy-lidded disdain, an insouciance borne of the sweltering climate and alien customs of a foreign land.  Did she spy in their eyes the glint of a tiger's predatory malice?  Perhaps, she reasoned, it was a lazy recollection of the tales of discovery and adventure she had read when left to explore the decaying bookshelves of her father's estate.  She had to hide of course and read by candlelight lest she be scolded or beaten for being idle, but therein she had found stories that had drawn her in, and cocooned her from the howling moors, the wind, and the rain of Mordent.  A world of heat, adventure, and danger - of opium, shapeshifting tigers, vulture-beaked demons, and sultry, full-breasted harem-girls, just at the time Danae discovered that such, indeed, was her taste.<br/><br/>To her new wards she reached out with ungloved hands, to settle upon the sensation of oiled skin, an exotic perfume - indescribable.  Dark, lank hair, smooth and glossy like ebony.<br/><br/>They had nothing of the scent of Drakon upon them - that mournful air of char-smoke and rain and mountain herbs - but a haunting sweetness that reminded her of the overwrought prose of her books of adventure - the only ones she ever gladly read.  In her memory of sitting in the fusty old armchair of the drawing room, the was page open on some moonless riverside vista at night, dancing-girls writhing and tawdry descriptions of wet, velvet nooks and fat arses parting, and before she knew it her hand was sliding into her riding breeches.  Quickly.  Before anyone comes.<br/><br/>Danae drew back her hand from a captive's midnight-black tresses and pondered whether all that had ever happened at all, or if it was yet another page spliced into a harlequin book that was no longer her own.  Someone else was writing her story - she was no longer the author of her own fate.  All these episodes were gross interpolations to steer her to the task at hand.  Father had been just as boorish and unlettered as she was - if he had a library, it likely contained Ezraite platitudes and treatises on agricultural subjects.  She could distinctly remember - or so she thought - the first time she had felt the wicked little tremor that put all other fleshly pleasures to shame it was while receiving a good caning from a prefect at school.  Which version, if any, was true -<em>truly</em>true - mattered not.  They would both exist within her.<br/><br/>"You, my ladies, have come from a place of shadows - moonless, lightless, illuminated by oil-lamps and the visages of brazen idols," she spoke the demotic speech of Drakon, and knew not whether she would be understood, "here your profession is but a common calling.  I shall now take you to a place where you shall find peace, far better than this forlorn city."<br/><br/>There was a wending passage, grown with moss, damp, smelling of stone and vegetation.  That was an egress from the bowels of the Cosmopolis club and onto the docks, where the flotsam and jetsam of humanity (and those not quite fitting that description) gathered and milled around in the early morning mist, under the sickly light of a distant sun.  Gaggles of street-whores and catamites, of press-gangs on the look out for drunken revellers to impress into service.  And, all around, hidden, but ever-present, the eyes and ears of the deathless ruler of the forsaken domain.  That she was chaperoning restrained foreigners to her anchored ship was no cause for interest.  In Martira Bay it was wise to keep one's own company and counsel.  To suppose even to ask the question was an unforgivable presumption.<br/><br/>Now she wore the skin of Captain Vine-Lott.  But for how long?  One day, that Danae would disappear, and perhaps another would be put in her stead.  Or she would be written out entirely, forever lost to a final death where no living being had any memory of her.<br/><br/>"Welcome on board the<em>Mercy</em>, my ladies," Danae spoke, and listless mariners looked away from her, as though they were repelled by her countenance.  She, alone, remembered Captain Baykur.  Today, the<em>Mercy</em>never had a Captain Baykur.  Her Captain had always been Danae Vine-Lott.  "You are my guests, but any lapse in discipline will be answered by the martinet."  The very thought sent a frisson of anticipation through her.  The kiss of Baykur's lash had been exquisite, and the braided leather now craved the supple curves and pliant depths of her newest wards.  She would soon find a pretext to use it.<br/><br/>"Lady Kazandra,"<em>is she the butcher of my memories, one of the ghost hands writing my fate?</em>, "I trust you are satisfied that we can sail at dawn and make good time.  The waves are high but the weather should hold.  I should be grateful if you would provide, as usual, that my room be ready upon my return."  The thought of the lash in her hand proved impossible to dispel, "Upon your return, might I ask that you chastise both Moll and Linde quite severely?  For infractions that I shall leave it to you to improvise."