“Talk to her,” McGloin responded, referring to Hannah Teasdale. “Let’s see if we can get her side of the story before meeting with Geddys. As for the witness list, it’s still evolving, and I’d like to call as few children as possible. At minimum we’ve got Dr. Childs, Hannah Teasdale, Jennifer Simmons, and Marcia Bradbury. Depending on what we find in those affidavits, we might identify a few others. Both David Simmons and Henry Teasdale might serve as character witnesses. Geddys’ lawyer is a woman named Sarah Gerhardt; provided by the Teacher’s Union no doubt. I don’t think he could afford her on his own salary. Let’s check his other connections at the school, too. Teachers, principals, coaches, someone has to know something about these parties, if not the girls themselves.”<br/><br/>A mighty workload was developing, and it all had to be delayed due to her assignment at the Municipal Ordinance Office that afternoon. She would have to cram as many interviews as she could into the few days before Geddys’ plea negotiation. McGloin wanted a plea carrying no less than 20 years in prison against him. That meant finding some damning evidence that couldn’t be excluded by a judge. The judge assigned to the case was the Hon. Judge Samuel Schaffner, a man who had spent time on both sides of the courtroom, most recently as a defense attorney. He was in his fifties, and had spent four years on the bench, a negligible amount of time in the eyes of any Servitor of Dominic.<br/><br/>The afternoon at MOO would have been excruciatingly slow, tedious, and distracting to any human who was also working on the Geddys case. The court case was far more important than anything that ever happened at the MOO, and the vast majority of humans, faced with the choice of efforts, would have closed the office for the afternoon much to the chagrin of the tax-paying public. Another lawyer had worked the morning shift, but there were still a half dozen people in line when Dinah arrived for the afternoon shift.<br/><br/>The first were easy rubber stamp building permits to renovate and refurbish a few commercial buildings in Ashbury. A pair of very casually dressed men appeared in order to obtain a permit for excavating a parcel of county-owned land on the undeveloped north side of town. The land was essentially worthless: it had no services, no utilities, no infrastructure. It was essentially a vacant lot the county acquired when the water treatment plant was built in the early sixties. The plant had recently been privatized, and the new company didn’t want to be responsible for a useless piece of land, so the county retained it as part of the sales deal. At least this is what was written in the permit proposal. The proposal stated that a team led by the pair wished to excavate the site for research purposes. The two men were a professional archaeologist and his assistant, experts in native history and culture.<br/><br/>In person, the two men were certainly odd. One, the better dressed of the two, remained silent through the interview. He was the assistant, and he let the professional lead the interview. He wasn’t aloof or disengaged, so he wasn’t all that out of place, just silent. The archaeologist however was the classic liberal professor type. He was young with a tan face, as if he worked outside a lot, and he had a day’s growth of stubble on his face. His large eyes, light blue, contrasted exceptionally with his complexion, and he had dark wavy hair that grew past his shoulder blades. It hung loose and unbound around his face. He wore an off-white, hand-woven shirt that was popular in Middle Eastern countries for its breathability in desert heat. The top buttons of his shirt were opened, revealing a thick matt of hair growing on his chest.<br/><br/>But more than anything else about him that caught the eye was a ceramic charm he wore around his neck. It appeared to be a simple, roughly polished stone mounted on a gold chain. When Dinah gazed upon it, however, she could see it was an Ethereal Artifact: an object with the power to alter the user’s abilities within the Symphony. While she couldn’t ascertain the particular qualities of the piece, it revealed to her that the two men before her were almost certainly Celestials, and didn’t mind potentially revealing themselves as such to other Celestials they met. This was most likely a sign of coming in peace, but it could also just as easily be carelessness and stupidity, or even an arrogant brashness.