Chapter 8, Fresh Start.
Once the course had been set, the Navigatrix and her kin had retreated from the bridge to their Sanctum with the whole of their respective aides, escorts, and sundry attendants. Their expertise no longer needed now that all had been entrusted to the skilled hands of the helmsmen to navigate and negotiate the hazards of the mundane universe as they approached the Manderville Point where they would be needed again. Such time, however, was not spent idly by any stretch of the imagination as each of the Navigators aboard committed themselves to the complex trans-dimensional mathematics, ritual warding, scrying, and sundry preparations that proceeded any warp journey for their strange ilk.
For the Navigatrix, the Navis Primaris, this meant many things from a serious of inspections under the calculated eyes of her personal medical staff, a bevvy of fortifying injections and inoculations against the known physical hazards of warp gazing, and finally the exhaustive mental preparations that saw her nearly literally attached to the cartography table and illuminated only by it's sickly greenish hues. The trappings of her office discarded save for the Navis Prima that was now rested atop a lectern beside one of the many data access ports of the table. The eager machine spirits consuming and translating the complex notations therein to a hololithic display of the many channels, lanes, and other features of note known of this sector and the Endless Sea on the other side of the Empyreal Divide.
There was some chagrin she felt every time she set to pre-emptively charting the course as none of it was absolute. The Endless Sea was ever changing in the mannerisms of it's flow, the nature of it's storms and shoals, and the thousand other things that didn't have an adequate nautical comparison in the languages of both Low and High Gothic, among the handful of other more engineered tongues that she knew. This is where the necessity of scrying came into play as she continued to sing softly to herself and stare out and beyond the confines of the hull with her blessed third eye. One hand always working with calculated precision over the control keys of the table whilst the other worked to carefully adjust the orientations of the display. If any but her kin might have weathered her uncovered eye, it all would have looked both bizarrely mundane and utterly alien.
Made only more so as it was done without the many trappings of her station and office, it was an intimate and quiet moment. The last she would have for some time once they were committed to the journey.
At some point in the midst of all of this, the Lady Navigator found a moment to dispatch a runner to deliver a letter to the Lady Captain's offices and quarters in kind. The caliber of hand writing was, to no one's surprise, exquisite in flow and attention to the proper forms of each letter upon expensive vellum with touches of incense and other small courtly authentications to support the identity of the sender. The seal of House Shiraishi serving as the first and final marker.
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