Introduction
One of the great and abiding truisms of life is that if one wishes one's entrance to achieve the maximum possible impact, one must arrive fashionably late.
Eliza arrives just as the clouds of the Emperor's wrath part, allowing a bright and heavenly radiance to pour down and sparkle off of the silver of her hair and the vivid sapphire of her gossamer silken kimono. She moves forward to approach the servant-child's podium, small pale bare toes peeking from beneath the hem of her ankle-length gown with each step, and although she glances curiously from person to person around the clearing, clearly taking note of the twinge of tension in the scene she's walked into, she just as clearly chooses to ignore it for the moment.
She accepts the offered scroll and reads, with a single curt nod as though she found written there exactly what she expected to find, and then beams a polite smile at the Emperor's herald. "Thank you, little one," she says, though in actual point of fact the diminutive woman is only barely greater in stature than the child. Somehow though she manages to make looking -up- into the faces of the others with her startlingly azure eyes seem every bit as imperious as if the gaze had come from any majestically willowy frame who ever towered over her peers. She tucks the scroll away into one sapphire sleeve as she regards each of the gathered luminaries, apparently choosing the moment to acknowledge the anxiety in the air after all.
"Don't let's be cross with each other, darlings," she pouts, a little cutesy vertical furrow of consternation creasing between her brows. "It's unbecoming." And without a further word or gesture, she simply turns toward the route leading down into town, attended by little whispery rustles of her silk as her bare feet pad breezily along, their soft paleness pristinely declining to be sullied by the dirt of the road.