The museum's exhibit is breathtaking, tall windows admitting natural light to the outer displays while careful partitions and lights highlight those items too fragile for such strong light. It's a joint production between the Vatican, Church of England, and Greek Orthodox highlighting their respective relics, artifacts, and aesthetic achievements. Pure publicity and a bit of jockeying among them, but out reach has been on an uptick during these times of heresy and blasphemous miracles.

Rosemary has the job of helping to corral forty students through this display of pomp and circumstance on a crisp Thursday afternoon. It was fine for the first two sections, then she saw the eyes.

They weren't eyes, not really, just a pair of rubies carefully worked into a reliquary she barely noticed. But they are eyes, familiar ones to part of Rosemary. She wants to pluck them and she wants to hide from them in equal measure.

  "—tell you again, Jacob.  Keep everything that comes out of your body to yourself.  No exceptions!  Goodness!"  The middle-schooler catches a stern glare for his antics, but the novice isn't yet as exasperated as Viv Sutherland—the girl whose lapel he just contaminated—so he avoids any real punishment.  When her back is turned, three of the older boys move in to add their own emphasis to the point with knuckles ground into tender spots.  They've been enforcing for her, lately, whether she allows it or not.  She wouldn't now, if she saw it, but she doesn't, and that's not all down to their finesse.

  Sister Patience's sleepless night is plain on her face, and she's been missing a lot today.  The children, unsurprisingly, discerned and began to exploit this in the first two minutes, and now she is well beyond wit's end, operating on the general impulse derived from helping to raise younger siblings.  So of course she ordinarily wouldn't have put her hands on a relic.  She's not that young and foolish, no matter what the rector says.  But when the gems just fall out at the lightest touch, what else can she do?  She tucks them quickly in a pocket before any of the children can get to them and resolves to locate one of the senior Orthodox priests as soon as the tour is through.

So many alarms go off as the school group moves to the next exhibit that even Rosemary is certain this is it. The museum doors are closed off, the police arrive, and every single one of the students is searched. Then other groups, even the curators are not spared. It takes more than an hour, and in all that time no one thinks to check on the red-headed woman in the wimple. Granted, that may be due to how busy she is keeping a bunch of adolescents in mind during the most exciting thing to happen on a class trip that didn't involve vehicular accident.

Physically the rubies in her pockets are not that large, but they demand outsized amounts of her attention. Her pocket feels like someone put a lead brick in it.

Eventually they're released, and coordinating with parents and bus driver to deal with the delay has Sister Patience busy until five in the afternoon. How and when does she approach the senior clergy?

  The answer, it turns out, is "anxiously, with far too much attention to her gait, rehearsing exactly what to say to make her good intentions obvious".  And it shouldn't be hard, right?  An easy thing to fix.  She hadn't even wanted to keep the rubies, which she now silently prays are garnet or something, anyway.  She'd have turned them over to the police, of course, if they hadn't skipped her statement; she just didn't want to risk any misunderstandings.  After all, these religious artifacts deserve better than to be tossed in some evidence bag.  Even that term feels all wrong—evidence is for crimes.  She was in the right place to notice a problem about to happen, and she quietly headed it off.  There's no reason for guilt.  There's no reason for her stomach to be in a knot, or her hands to be sweating.

  Damp-palmed, she arrives at the small room where a pair of assistants are wrapping up the same task she'd just been engaged in.  She hasn't much time to explain to extra people, as she was expected to return to her watch of the children when she finished on the phone.  But the Staff Only door behind them is open enough she can hear one of the priests talking excitedly to someone.  She wouldn't sneak anywhere.  There's just no need to interrupt anyone, and being unobtrusive is polite.  No one stops her.

Rosemary hears what if anyone else was involved she would call an argument. Except the priests pretty much never raise their voices. Of course they could be stern or coaxing or a bit manipulative when called for but anger was drilled out of them with the rhetoric training. The other side sounds tired with faintly clipped vowels.

"- channels, you can't just demand she and our church reschedule on the strength of one letter," the priest is protesting.

"As it happens, I can do just that," the unknown man responds, annoyance plain in his voice, "You seem sufficiently staffed to spare one sister for a week."

There's a drumming sound, an impatient roll of fingers across wood.

"She is one of our family, her safety is n-"

"Is not at risk," the other says with a sigh.

The conversation has a well worn feel, they've been circling these points for a while before Rosemary could here.

  "E-excuse me, presbyter?"  The word sounds unpracticed, falling from Rosemary's lips as she rounds the door.  Eavesdropping would be rude, so she'd want to give every impression she'd heard nothing at all.  And maybe, just maybe, there's some anxiety driving her to fill silence.  "I'm sister Patience, from the Catholic group?  I was hoping to return something to you."  The hand in her pocket sweats still, and gripping the stones so tightly isn't helping matters.  She'll have whole dents in the skin.
This message was last edited by the player at 02:49, Fri 17 Sept 2021.