Matias’s Tuesday morning odd encounter(Arachne)

June 18, 2025

Date: 2025-06-17 10:19

(Matias’s Tuesday morning odd encounter(Arachne):Arachne)

[Tue Jun 17 2025]

A dark rendezvous
The faculty office presents itself as a modest rectangular space with dark
wood paneling that has aged to a deep mahogany hue over the decades. A heavy
wooden desk dominates the room, its surface worn smooth from years of use,
positioned to face the door with a high-backed leather chair behind it. Two
visitor chairs with cracked leather seats sit before the desk, their wooden
frames matching the overall aesthetic. Tall bookshelves line the walls,
packed with academic texts whose spines show varying degrees of wear,
interspersed with curious artifacts and specimens in glass jars that catch
the light from the single window overlooking the quad. The window itself is
framed by heavy velvet curtains in deep burgundy, partially drawn to filter
the daylight. A brass desk lamp with a green glass shade provides additional
illumination, casting shadows across stacks of papers and an old inkwell that
still holds position on the desk despite the presence of modern pens. The
floorboards creak softly underfoot, particularly near the threshold and
beneath the window where the wood has warped slightly with age. The air
carries the distinct scent of old paper and leather, mixed with something
faintly medicinal that seems to emanate from the specimen jars./span
It is about 65F(18C) degrees. The mist is heaviest At High and Hart/span

It is a tuesday morning, well early afternoon really and thus Matias is in his office behind a dominant wooden desk making notes for his weekly ethics class. There appear to be some manilla folders with the big 3 faction names on the tab and some outline about personal vs group ethics. There also happen to be a few student files like Kai Ashford and Juliet Rothwell off to the side with little post-it notes reminding him to update the contents. He is otherwise absorbed in his academic paperwork, a beaucracy

The quiet of the faculty office is disturbed by an email notification that chimes to Matias’ phone, the headline reading Read Immediately and addressed from Arachne Fairchild-Montrose. Inside, a single line awaits him, crisp and direct: Court Affairs – Private Auction of Intrigue. A car is waiting in the parking lot. An image is attached at the bottom, a curated jpeg of an embelm that belongs to a fae dealer of whispered legend, simply known by the moniker of The Hostess. Masks are required. Whatever Arachne has gotten him into now, it’s not bureaucracy. It’s far more dangerous, and likely more interesting.

Matias leans down to a drawer and produces what appears to be a masquerade mask of off-white clouds with an asian style fluffy curling to them which covers half his face. From there the e-mail gets deleted and he walks down to the parking lot to meet the driver, mask in hand just in case the Court had provided one of their own for the meeting. Waiting for the driver to open the door he passively wonders if this Fae Dealer will likewise be in All Saints or somewhere else this time.

The blacked-out town car awaiting Matias transports him through winding streets, onto the highway, and eventually comes to a halt within an alley behind the Atlantic Trading Company’s warehouse. A heavy presence in the air, and the hour is suddenly twilight, with electronic devices failing. The moment Matias steps out of the vehicle, his mask in place, the car pulls off smoothly and there is only a lone door that grants entry. An impossibly tall, splindly figure guards the threshold, permitting entry seemingly on a whim.

Matias pulls out his phone to send a text only to have it fail to send to Arachne. There is a quiet *tut* as the man tucks his useless device back into his blazer breast pocket. Masked as clouds the professor begins to approach the much taller than him, spindly guard. As he nears he practices the oldest of academic traditions, speak not lest you prove yourself a fool and so the man tucks a hand into his jean pant pocket and expectantly awaits the guard to pass him through, he can only hope.

The spindly figure shifts as Matias approaches, its joints bending not quite right, like a marionette hung too loosely on invisible strings. No eyes can be seen beneath the lacquered bone-and-glass mask it wears, but something behind it sees him all the same. For a long moment, there is only the sound of wind through rusted gutters and the faint creak of the warehouse groaning against its own age. Then, with a flick of a finger far too long to be human, the creature gestures silently to the door, which opens with a sigh of velvet and steel.

No words pass. They never do within the Vaults of the Hostess. Matias is permitted entry, and the threshold shimmers faintly as he steps into the dark, leaving behind the world above.

Chandeliers cast kaleidoscopic hues that mesmerize and dance from lofty heights in unending darkness above, the shadows unnervingly dark as velvet drapes shift. The path forward is easy, taking winding stairs until he arrives at an antechamber where hundreds have gathered into plush assortments of armchairs around a central half-circle stage.

Matias finds himself inexplicably guided to a single open armchair beside a young woman swathed in the deepest blacks of spider silk, her identity obscured behind a half-mask of lace, blood rubies, and black diamonds. A faint scar, aligning just over the plunging cut of her gown, spiders out from across her heart, the tissue barely newly healed, as though she’d survived a staking.

As Matias/span is led silently into the Vaults of the Hostess there are just slate-grey eyes against a new identical hued mask searching the room until he is seated. It doesn’t take an academic genius to guess at the identify of the dramatically dressed woman who gets a silent dip of his head with a subtle gesture around the room, which he then proceeds to examine himself before turning to her the silent conversation conveying piqued curiosity, but very little obvious concern for whether the recovery is going well.

gently takes Matias’s hand and turns it over, baring the inside of his wrist to allow the tip of a coffin-shaped manicured nail to delicately spell out precise letters. W A T C H — T H E — M AN – B U T T E R F L Y — The words are written with care, almost reverence, but her gaze never leaves the stage.

The lights above flicker once, then steady, casting the auction floor in a surreal, opaline glow that pools like liquid across the stage.

A hush ripples outward from its center like a held breath, and then The Hostess of Hollow Velvet steps into view, a vision wrapped in decayed moonlight, her gown layered with iridescent beetle wings and crushed pearl dust. Her voice never touches the air. Instead, it spills directly into the mind, a sensation like being whispered to from inside one’s own bones.

“We begin,” the voice impresses upon them all.

Arachne tightens her grip just the slightest upon Matias’s wrist. On the stage, an attendant unveils the first artifact; a mirrored music box that appears to hum even without opening, its melody echoing from somewhere deep within the floor. Its reflections do not match reality. Its bidding begins immediately.

Matias’s hand and wrist are the soft skinned hands of an academic and not necessarily a knight of the Illusium court and so the message is rather clearly received with no callous nor scar to make it difficult. Looking to the stage much in the same patient if not reverant manner as his companion. The murmur throughout the room gets a curious look away from the stage for a brief moment and then a soft *ah* as the voice all but fills his head. There is no bidding from himself on the piece, though he does try from afar to guess the age and perhaps the nature of lingering magic upon the piece. Professional auctions are so impersonal and harder on the appraisers to truly inspect such unique items, but still he tries with a squint.

As the mirrored music box draws its final bid, a sum whispered in minds rather than numbers, a new lot is unveiled with a flourish: not an object, but a person. Shackled in luminous thread and bound with silent chains of iron, the creature steps forward; wings tattered, eyes dulled by enchantments, yet unmistakably fae.

The Hostess’s voice presses once more into the minds of those gathered, “Lot Forty-Three: A dreambound messenger of the Pale Winds, traitor to her Queen. Opening bid begins now.”

A ripple of unease twists through a few in the rows, and Arachne’s hand tightens sharply on Matias’s, tension radiating through her poise. The butterfly-masked man tilts his head ever-so-slightly, as if in anticipation. Somewhere behind them, a cloaked bidder murmurs to another, and a faint gleam of a drawn blade flashes beneath their robes. The illusion of civility begins to fray. The auction, it seems, hinged on this single moment

Matias looks over his shoulder at the murmuring of competitors in bidding and then back to the stage. Since the instructions were clear the slate-grey eyes of the Professor settle solely and exclusively onto the butterfly-masked member of the audience even a the hand that Arachne holds curls a finger to draw a simple rune of protection against her own flesh, the cloak of warding against short blades settling about the recovering spider for at least a short time should the tension reach a breaking point. No bid placed, he’d leave such things up to his companion to perform or direct.

Arachne raises a hand in a subtle, precise gesture to signal her interest in the bound creature. The air shifts, thickening as magic is woven into her offer, outbidding a show-masked rival by sheer force of social debt. someone’ ward curls around her like a shimmer of mist, just before the Butterfly Mask turns his head fully toward them, something dark flickering behind the gold. The rune has drawn notice.

Two rows over, a masked figure suddenly lunges from their seat, fingers outstretched toward the stage, a bolt of lightning arcing through the air.

Chaos erupts immediately. Magic shatters as illusions break apart; another attendee flings a shard of living obsidian toward a rival while two fae knights draw steel that glows like molten moonlight. The Hostess remains perfectly still, and yet the air screams with binding magic; unseen chains rise to choke the room back into stillness, unless one moves fast enough to seize the moment before the Vaults devour them all.

Arachne is already on her feet, shoving Matias out of his seat and into the aisle, as the Butterfly Mask suddenly lurches into motion after them, and the fae knights impaling another attendee on their blades.

Arachne raises a hand in a subtle, precise gesture to signal her interest in the bound creature. The air shifts, thickening as magic is woven into her offer, outbidding a show-masked rival by sheer force of social debt. Matias’s ward curls around her like a shimmer of mist, just before the Butterfly Mask turns his head fully toward them, something dark flickering behind the gold. The rune has drawn notice.

Two rows over, a masked figure suddenly lunges from their seat, fingers outstretched toward the stage, a bolt of lightning arcing through the air.

When the chaos erupts there is a brief pause from Matias/span and then Arachne is shoving him out of the seat into the isle. One can only presume the goal of the day is exit and hope all bids are honoured so the academic hangs back, blade drawn from an interior sheath in his belt and allowing Arachne the lead on where they are going, Matias a step behind, one hand trying to stay in contact with her back just incase he has to invoke a shadowwalk as unseen chains of binding magic aren’t so easily missed by one with arcane senses. Until the butterfly-masked man poses a greater threat it seems the Professor bends fate to protect the path Arachne chooses: oh that person tripped, this person bumped into that person, there is an opening.

The Butterfly Mask distorts grotesquely as he advances, limbs unraveling into jagged, silk-thin spears that lance through two nearby attendees, impaling them to their chairs in a spray of sudden violence. Around them, psychic chains whip through the air, snapping into place around others, locking bodies in silence and stillness as the Vaults attempt to reassert control. The fae knights make it to the stage, blades drawn high to free the bound creature, but with a single raised finger from the Hostess, they are struck down by an unseen force, their bodies twisted and twisted until they’re fate-crafted into bloodied amalgamations of their former selves. The Butterfly Mask gives chase as the fate’s magic that protects them both struggles to hold up under the oppressive magics attempting to snare them, paths barely aligning as the chaos deepens.

Matias finds himself tripping over the foot of a dead attendee, just as the Butterfly Mask comes bearing down, his pincered, bladed hand swishing down from above.

Unlucky… It isn’t Matias’s first time being unlucky staring up from his back at the Butterfly Masked multi-limbed being bearing down on himself. Even in the chaos he hasn’t spoken, save a subtle mm or ah here and there. Now as the potentially fatal stab winds in on him, one hand goes into his pocket grasping at a saint minted coin, while the other hand with a short blade tries to deflect. He finally speaks with psychic persasion dripping from the words fear, anger, and curiosity try to find purchase in the Butterfly Masked being minds, “Good thing you did not **look behind yourself** and see my summon.” he says with all the confident of a desperate liar. There is of course nothing there but openings are openings.

The Butterfly Mask jerks mid-strike, halting just short of driving its limb clean through Matias’ chest as the professor’s words land; just barely. Its many eyes seem to flicker, drawn toward the empty space behind it as if some part of its fractured mind believes. That moment is enough. The blade meant for Matias glances off his own with a shriek of metal, redirected just enough to tear a deep laceration along his arm instead of impaling him. Blood sprays across the marble, and the Mask twists with insectile fury, searching for the threat. Arachne is already there, grasping Matias’s arm with surprising strength, her gown in ruined tatters, stained with blood as reality around them shudders. The stage flickers into coral reefs, the chandelier above pulses like a heart, and whatever veil holds the Vaults together is beginning to rupture. “Fucking fatecrafting bitch,” she hisses under her breath, her chest burning, heart threatening to beat out through her staked scarring. “Shadowalk, now!”

Matias grasps at Arachne’s upper arm with his good one, the bleeding from his sliced arm spreading quickly on the floor. There is a warbling sound as the image of both himself and Arachne wavers, loses focus, and with a bamf of smoke and shadow they vanish from the Vault of the Hostess and re-appear in the office where he had started on Windermere grounds half on his back clinging to Arachne and grimacing.

The smoke clears in a blink, and the surreal hum of the Vaults is replaced by the sterile stillness of Matias’s office, the scent of paper and old wood grounding them in the present. Arachne collapses into one of the chairs, her breath ragged, head falling back against the rest as she clutches her side where blood seeps steadily through torn silk. Both wounded, shaking, but alive; and for now, that is enough.

“We were meant to get the damned girl, but those fucking Laurieans always get in my -way-.”

“It is hard to say, which was the draw for that particular lot,” Arachne manages out after collecting herself, lifting her head and bringing a hand up to rub at her face. “A contact asked me to attend and made the arrangements for us to investigate, and bid, but we weren’t informed that there were Laurieans of the Court she came from looking to kill her.”

extracts herself slowly from the chair, dusting herself off and stripping a piece of bandage from her purse to push it into place on her bleeding side, stemming the bleeding. “Right in time to patch ourselves up and for you to be ready for class,” she murmurs, noticing the notification. “I’ll see you in All Saints tomorrow.”