[Indigo]

I'm taking a chance on you with this one, Wicke. You'd better not let me down.

Brandy dismissed the text notification with a swipe of her thumb, and suppressed the urge to sigh. Diesel was not, from what she'd heard, the worst editor to work under, but he did have a terrible knack for sending her ominous messages at just the right time to throw her off balance. Some other, even editor-ier editor must be getting on his case about something or other. She and her aspirations were always a convenient outlet for his frustrations.

For the last eight months of her life Brandy had been buried under a mountain of top ten lists and personality quizzes and sub-200-word analyses of somebody's haircut at some award show—it's what the people want, Diesel would say, waxing his mustache like some kind of supervillain. Maybe it was. Certainly it got pageviews and sold magazines, but it was almost the antithesis of what she'd gotten into the business to do: serious investigative journalism about important issues, a series of words she had said so often in meetings that it now came out of her mouth with the same cadence every time. She knew some of the other writers laughed at her about it, and didn't care. She'd been doing good work at the old newspaper before it closed. She was worth more than this, even if she was stuck with it for now.

This was her chance to get back on track. She'd finally dug her way out of the fluff pieces and gotten permission to work on a story about organized crime in Aldrect, namely why there was so little of it compared to other cities of its size. It was a subject with some personal significance to her, even if she had little to do with her cousins outside the occasional holiday dinner, but more importantly it was a story she knew she could absolutely nail, even being months out of practice. And if she succeeded here, she could make a case to do more work along the same lines, or if all else failed maybe get picked up by another publication.

"More editorial," she said under her breath as she walked. "Not editor-ier. That just sounds silly."

Her first stop was a detective agency, since private eyes were sometimes more talkative than police, and far less likely to be secret mobsters. She hadn't been to this one before, although the name Brodnax had the tang of familiarity when she came across it; for the past few days she'd had the sense that the context she knew it from was just on the tip of her tongue. Terrible. If it didn't come to her soon she'd have to ask Niles just so she could stop grinding her teeth about it; her brother seemed to remember the name of everybody he'd ever met.

In any case, this appeared to be the right place, and she reached up to adjust her bun, make sure the pink streaks didn't show; they weren't dyed in, but they looked like they were, and she found that people thought she was a lot younger than her actual age when they were visible. She wanted this conversation to go as smoothly as possible. Once satisfied, and with one last look at her muted phone, she went inside.

[Mousen]

The Cynthia Brodnax Detective Agency was an unassuming building on the corner of Coney Street and Friar's Gate. The only indication that it was anything as exciting as a detective agency was the small plaque by the door. Cythnia had put in various levels of security, of course, but they were all the subtle kinds of changes not easily noticed by the typical passerby.

Roscoe, the detective agency's secretary, was painting his nails. He had a phone tucked into his ear, and would occasionally pause, roll his eyes, and note something down. His desk was exceptionally tidy, save for several bottles of nail polish clustered together. "Hm, yep," he said into the phone. "I got it, I got it. You think someone has stolen your dog. Mister- Mister. You said you bought the dog in 1976-- Yes I know."

The other desks in the room belonged to the detectives, although only two of them were sat at them today. One of them had no less than four blue lipstick-stained coffee cups at her desk, which was largely covered in loose sheets of paper. The detective in question, her blonde hair pulled away from her face, was gently wafting a coffee-coloured sheet of wet paper through the air.

"That was entirely your own fault," said the other detective in the room, calling over to her. "Stick it on the radiator." She had an accent, although where that accent placed her in the world was difficult to say.

"Ugh. I told Cynthia I'd have my files organised today," she whined.

"And if you stop making a fuss and clear up your desk, you might actually get somewhere." She rose from her desk, moving over to Bobbie's. "C'mon, I'll help."

Her eyes lit up. "Thank you, Osanna!" She paused. "But, don't you have something to do today?"

Osanna shrugged. "No case at the moment. Esther's investigating a mugging Cynthia thinks is suspicious, and Gertie's out chasing her white whale."

Bobbie groaned. "Not the thief? Again?"

"You know what she's like. Anyway, be grateful that Cynthia isn't thinking about sending you with her next time. The last thing I want to do is get involved in that whole thing. The thief's an obvious egomaniac and I don't have the patience for it."

Bobbie handed Osanna a set of papers, clearing a space on her desk. "Let's just hope she gets him this time."

Inside her office, Cynthia was pacing idly. It helped her think. She made an estimate at their rate of success over the past three months, and found it to be acceptable, although a little lower than she would have liked. She thought about where Ester was in the path of development she had set out for her, she considered how much it would be to repair the guttering on that one side of the building and whether she ought to keep a pot of money aside for these things. She perched herself on her desk and sighed, reaching for her cup of tea and plate of digestive biscuits. Something of the gesture, the informality of it, the way her feet just scraped the floor suddenly reminded her of her sister. She sighed and stood up, it was definitely time to get back to work.

Cynthia opened the door into the main floor of the building. "Bobbie! Please tell me you're not distracting Osanna with your abysmal organisation."

[Indigo]

The secretary was on the phone when Brandy entered, so she stood off to one side waiting for him to finish, and studied the room with an eye for detail. The resident detectives—at least, she assumed that's who they were—didn't seem to take much notice of her entrance, but then that was the secretary's job. Before she could observe much of anything meaningful, the door to a separate office opened and admitted someone she suspected was the eponymous Cynthia Brodnax.

Brandy did not frown thoughtfully, because standing around making faces at people didn't tend to make them want to answer your questions, but she did think frownfully. The nagging specter of familiarity had returned. She definitely hadn't met Cynthia Brodnax before, but there was something about her that suggested someone else Brandy had met, or exchanged a few words with in passing, or seen from across a busy street. As feelings went it was not one of her favorites, but she held onto it. If she dismissed it then it would just come back to haunt her later.

The detectives were clearly busy with their own affairs, but she couldn't help listening in a little; they must know she was there, even if they weren't paying attention to her, and with her lupine senses she was going to hear just about anything they said above a whisper anyway, so it was more a lack of effort to ignore them than active eavesdropping. And she wanted to know what kind of people she was dealing with.

She approached the secretary's desk and consciously did not read whatever he'd been writing down during his phone call. It wouldn't be relevant to her work, and she had no desire to violate anyone's privacy, but she also had a bad habit of automatically reading any words her eyes happened to fall on, so she did have to think about it a little. One day she'd train herself out of it, ingrained habits be damned.

"Good morning," she said. "I'm Brandy Wicke with the Desuna Pulse, and I was wondering if there was someone here I could talk to about organized crime." She had to mention the magazine to explain her presence, but hopefully no one here had heard of it beyond a name. It was more known for the kind of shallow fluff they'd had her doing than anything else.

[Mousen]

Roscoe had managed to disentangle himself from his phone call by the time Wicke approached his desk, he was gently blowing over the flawless mauve polish and took a few moments to respond to her. His expression didn't suggest someone unfriendly or unwilling to their job, just someone who took pride in their own appearance had and a fondness for making people wait for them. "Good morning, Ms. Wicke," he said eventually. "Did you have an appointment?" He flicked half-heartedly through his calendar. "Oh, whatever," he said more to himself than to her. "Cynthia!"

Cynthia turned at the mention of her name, half-way through an insult about Bobbie's organisational skills.

"Press. They want to talk to you about organised crime." He gestured to Wicke, as though Cynthia may somehow be able to miss the stranger by the front desk.

She let some of the tension go out of her shoulders, and stepped towards them.  "Cheerful," she said lightly, offering out her hand. "I'm Cynthia Brodnax, owner of the Cynthia Brodnax Detective Agency. Would you like to step through into my office?"

She paused for a moment. "And I don't mean to be paranoid, but if I can see some ID and your press card that'd be fantastic." It wasn't that Cynthia expected a hired killer to be wandering about pretending to be from a magazine that she'd never heard of, it was just that she wasn't not expecting it. The problem with quiet weeks was that you never knew when they'd turn into loud, dangerous ones.

Bobbie and Osanna were gathering up Bobbie's papers into neat stacks on her desk, and starting to slip them into the correct files. Despite Cynthia's grumbling, it really was quicker with the two of them there. Bobbie picked up her mugs, and headed outside the office. She had to excuse herself by Wicke, eyes flicking up to hers for a brief moment, smile on her painted blue lips, before she was out the door and on the way to the small office kitchen.

[Indigo]

Brandy gave a little wave when the receptionist pointed to her, without really thinking about it until afterward. Probably it made her seem nonthreatening. Whether that was good or bad was harder to say. A strategy of not particularly caring that she'd shown up without an appointment suggested a few things, but she'd have to spend some more time with these people to figure out exactly which was most likely.

She shook the offered hand, and didn't think about that too hard earlier. Werewolf strength usually only garnered pissy comments from men; it wasn't like she went around crushing people's hands. "Oh, of course." There was the name again, the feeling at the back of her brain again, she was definitely going to have to call Niles when she got home, it wasn't as if she could ask Cynthia Brodnax about it right now. She slid her wallet out of an inside jacket pocket and produced her ID and press card for examination.

The detective with the blue lipstick brushed past her, and for a moment their eyes met, which wouldn't have seemed significant to Brandy except for the detective's flash of a smile. What on earth did that mean? Maybe nothing. Now was not really the time to worry about it, since she clearly was not going to be involved in this conversation. Though Brandy did take a moment to be impressed by the detective's ability to hold four mugs at once.

[Mousen]

Cynthia's eyebrows raised fractionally as Wicke shook her hand, a spark of faint recognition somewhere within her, matching Wicke's own. Or, perhaps it was nothing at all, and Cynthia was being ridiculous. Being reminded of a relative of hers was nothing new, her family being as large and varied as it was. She filed away the intuition for later.

She glanced over the press cards and the I.D. that, at least, seemed to be in order. "Follow me," she said simply, and made her way past the desks of the other detectives until she reached the door to her office. Osanna was still clearing up Bobbie's desk, and Roscoe was back to admiring his nail polish, pretty standard. Cynthia held open the door for Wicke, and then slipped inside herself.

Her office was a little darker than the offices, the walls stripped back to exposed brick. There was enough room for a side board with a coffee maker and a couple of house plants, as well as a fairly substantial desk and some filing cabinets. Her desk was exceptionally neat, dark wood so glossy it reflected the ceiling. On it was a pencil pot, a note pad, a book with a bookmark about two thirds of the way through and a closed case file. Cynthia seated herself behind the desk and seemed to study Wicke for a moment.

"Would you like a cup of coffee?" she asked, after a moment of silence had passed between them.

[Indigo]

She surveyed the office more out of a sense that she should be picking up some vital information from it than an actual ability to do so. Once upon a time her skills had been more in line with those of these detectives—well, assuming that these detectives were good at their job, but it would be needlessly confrontational to come in assuming otherwise—and certainly Brandy wouldn't say she had lost her touch, but it was true she was a little rusty. No matter.

The plants were nice. Most of the offices she'd been in recently were sterile, lifeless things, and while they were often peppered with visually-convincing artificial greenery, it just didn't smell right. And any place without at least a little bit of nature in it prickled her spine.

"Coffee would be lovely," she said, and glanced down at the book on the desk, pure curiosity about what the detective might be reading. Brandy allowed a suitable pause before giving a more thorough explanation of her presence; spouting too many words too early would make her look nervous even if she wasn't, and in any case she needed a moment to review her thoughts and make sure she'd put them all in the right order before they came out of her mouth.

"I'm here because I'm pursuing a story about the unexpectedly low levels of organized crime in this city," she said. Get straight to the point, because dancing around it is suspicious and you've never been good at it anyway, you can lie and you can tell the truth but you can't really manage that in-between. It was possible she felt a little defensive about the whole thing. Sometimes it seemed to her that her relatives' names were written on her forehead and she would always have to wipe that association away before she did anything else. "Given that you're detectives, I was hoping someone here might know something about how that state of affairs came to be. I'm not looking to draw undue attention to anyone, since I'm well aware of the danger that might pose, just to find some answers about why things are different here than elsewhere."

[Mousen]

Cynthia nodded, her short dark hair swaying as she moved towards the coffee maker. She was a tall woman, with strong features; heavy brows, a large arched nose, and blue eyes that were so intense it was difficult to meet them for long. Everything about her suggested a women who was not to be trifled with."Sit," she said, a suggestion rather than a command.

The coffee maker made some gentle bubbling noises, tipping out a quantity of steaming brown liquid into a mug. She paused to make one for herself (goodness knows where her cup of tea from earlier had gone), and then brought them both over, settling behind her desk.

"Ah," she said, tracing the edge of her mug with a finger. "That's a very good question, Ms. Wicke. We have some run-ins now and again with the crime families, as you might imagine," Cynthia tried to not think about the invite her father gave her every year at Christmas. "And... on the whole, we've come out on top. Our own record with this aside-- and if you need to fill out your article I might have an old case file you can pick anecdotes out of-- there's only one reason Aldrect is like this, and his name is Eizou Nakamura. He's a detective with the ACPD. He works with us from time-to-time, I wouldn't go so far as so say we're friends. I don't think Eizou has friends. I trust him, even though I couldn't even begin to tell you how he's doing it." Privately, of course, Cynthia had various suspicions about how Nakamura was managing to make so many arrests, but she wasn't necessarily willing to share them. She took a small sip of her coffee. "The Clavell arrests were all his, so were the Red Harriers. I can put you in contact."