Threat of fire did not keep the asylum's lunatics at bay. Quite the opposite, as a beastly purpose awoke in the patients and set them after Danae. It was the Red Woman who feared fire, and the duty of her subordinates to smother it. But they proved unprepared for Danae's speed, and the wall of resistance came too slow. A smash of porcelain, a tumble of bodies, and she was through them into a dark, claustrophobic room.<br/><br/>Dust, mountains of dust- no, a pattern of slate on black like moth-eaten velvet, curtaining an ugly bed of the same joyless pattern. Poised over it was a black canopy like dark jaws poised to claim its sweat-slick occupant.<br/><br/>Doctor Noire aroused from her sleep in a slip of black, and lifted the lace sleep mask from her eyes when Danae's illumination shone upon her. Defeat was what the light revealed, a woman whose plans had gone so awry that all that remained was anticipation of her fate.<br/><br/>"I told you to destroy her, when you had the chance."<br/><br/>Doctor Noire clasped the icon of Ezra at her bosom, and lit a solitary lead-seated candle with unsteady fingers.<br/><br/>"Is this how you would conduct your final moments of autonomy, Mlle. Vine-Lott- thrashing, pounding the walls, casting threats not unlike a madwoman?"<br/><br/>What secrets lie within Doctor Noire's bedchamber were difficult to bare with the woman present. Whatever secrets her drab room contained, she was still the master of, even in this defenseless state.<br/><br/>The clothes folded into Doctor Noire's drawers were fit to a thin and severe woman, in pinstripe with gathered sleeves and stuffy lace edging, buttons small and plentiful, brocade cuffs, stiff belts of leather suitable for laying welts.<br/><br/>Not a solitary drop of alcohol. A dry asylum.<br/><br/>"If you require intervention to behave rationally, I may give it. You will be left weeping on my floor like an orphaned babe. But that is not how I wish to remember you, Mlle. Vine-Lott. I would remember you as a soldier facing the gallows with dignity. Give me that, and you may join me awaiting the grim morning."<br/><br/><div class="spoiler_container"><div class="spoiler_header" onclick="hideSecond (this);" role="button">Investigation</div><div class="spoiler_body">Nothing of interest is found!</div></div>