Concavenator:

Grikaa was dense and grimy, its alleys steep and narrow, paved with sharp cobblestone that gripped boots and wheels even when frozen, and shadowed by overhangs and balconies that stole each other's sunlight. Creaking carriages filled the broader streets, drawn by grunting astrapotheres at the pace of glaciers, while trained bats flittered all around with their little parcels, and strings of branded penguins were driven from market to market. The great northern sea moaned in the distance, audible but invisible beyond the pall of darkness and smoke, though sometimes an iceberg cauht the low sun and flashed red. On the opposite side, smoking tenements covered the sky.

They walked on, the two of them, down a tilted alleyway almost crushed between parallel cliffs of sandstone and mortar. Giya walked grazing one of the walls, timidly glancing up at the bulk of the buildings, whose roofs almost rouched. “How will we find the chapterhouse, Kukri?” she asked, “All streets and all buildings look the same”.

pinkgothic:

Amusement tickled Kukri's air. “Ah, navigating in the city will be something you will build an intuition for quickly. The textures are never quite the same from place to place, and the pattern of the tallness of the buildings varies. The tallest, in turn, are useful markers. For example, if you look over there,” she said, gesturing toward an intimidatingly proud roof that was visible between the others largely by merit of her pointing it out, and only secondarily by the way it caught the sun. “That's a spire of the Parliament.”

Concavenator:

Giya craned her neck to see, with something like awe in the tilt of her head; the spire, too, caught the low red light, though it seemed to glow from its own Power. It would take a while for her to learn to navigate by herself, to be sure. She looked around, to see other reference points, but from the depths of that alley most were hidden. Perhaps more could be seen from the harbor or the market square. “Were you ever in there? Did you meet the Consuls?”

pinkgothic:

“Yes, and no,” Kukri answered the questions in turn. “My own guild's– our own guild's Archon is the one who would most regularly speak to the other members of Parliament, but personally, I've spoken to some of our Major Members - and once to the Archon herself - in those halls. It is where it's easiest to find them, after all.”

Concavenator:

To Giya, surely, even this was fantastically closer to the heart of the Republic than she'd ever dreamed of being. She had twitched, for the slightest fraction of a heartbeat, when Kukri had described the Archon of natural philosophers as theirs, as Giya's, as speaker for her before the other Archons and the Consuls and all the great and learned ladies. And she found herself already wondering, wondering, what she would do with her own scrap of a scrap of power. “I think… I think what I would say if I were with the Archons, if a Consul walked up to me”.

pinkgothic:

Kukri tilted her head with some curiosity. “And what are you coming up with?” she asked, encouraging Giya to imagine that future.

Concavenator:

Giya's tail twitched, sweeping against the drystone wall. “I do not know yet. Maybe I ask why it is so hard to live out in Yakak'ratu and in the field, and why so many people do evil and why they are not taken away. Or I ask if they know what you–” There was a catch in her voice, barely noticeable. “If they know what we study, and what they will do to save us from the ice. I am thinking maybe they are foolish questions and they have heard them sixty-four times. The priest in Yakak'ratu says that the chaos below is compressed more with time passing, so it becomes worse and pushes back, like the steam engine”.

pinkgothic:

Kukri considered the analogy of pressure. In truth, it seemed to her more that the chaos was here, and if at all compressing, then doing so before her eyes - the world was ever more complex from day to day, with fantastic inventions enabling things that they could not have dreamt of a generation ago. Were ideas chaos? Inventions?

She pulled her thoughts back to the present, and to the conversation with Giya. “I don't think they've heard a question about what to do about the ice even once so far,” she postulated. It wasn't wholly her best numeric guess; after all, she had been sent to measure the ice because someone had asked about it at least once already. “As philosophers, we must ask questions even if they strike us as foolish or ill-advised. It's polite to declare them as such, but they must still be asked. Asking questions is how we learn about the world.”

She was leading Giya through the streets, still limping a little, but with a sure sense of direction. Best to sort any frictions with the Guild first - the matter of having needed to be vouched for would need to be discussed, after all - and then return what belonged to the Guild itself, file the new data, and get Giya registered. Then, once that was done, maybe a store would still be open and let her buy herself a better walking aid.

“Just like how we asked: How long has the ice been growing, and at which speeds?” she mused. “And now we have some information that should allow us to answer that question.”

Concavenator:

Giya followed, mulling for a while, and then replied with some cheer: “I will ask then, when I see the great ladies. Then I will hear the answer, and I will go tell my father when I see him in Yakak'ratu. I will tell all, if I may, Kukri, if guild secret does not cover it”.

There was, as it happened, a little store in a side alley that advertised walking canes and wooden legs and eye patches at modest price.

pinkgothic:

Kukri hesitated in her stride. Perhaps, with it being on the way, now was the right time? But even the modest prices were too high right now, unless they were willing to take the word of a philosopher for a down payment - all the set backs in Yakak'ratu had rather drained Kukri's reserves.

She decided to earmark the store for later and press on, even if her leg didn't much like her for the choice.

“The philosophers don't have many secrets,” Kukri said, encouragingly, continuing the conversation. “It would be hard to find answers if we weren't forthright with the truth.”