I am a thief, of sorts, aboard a ship. We will be making port soon, and when we do, I will need to be making myself scarce as quickly and unnoticed as possible. With this in mind, I’ve packed light. Everything I need to take with me I’ve crammed into a gsses case; fine watch, tube of lipstick, neckce from my mother, identification for my next alias. I snap the case shut and hope that it’s waterproof.

  I make my way out onto the open air of the top deck as we sail into the harbor. I have time to see the other great wooden ship barrelling headlong towards us and brace myself for impact. Bow and hull splinter against one another, and – according to pn – I make the running leap from one sinking ship to the other. In the chaos no one notices as I make my way to the end of this second ship closest to shore and then dive off into the warm, clear, tropical waters.

  Once ashore, I dry myself, rest, find a change of clothes, and go to meet with the foreign schors expecting the arrival of my newest identity.

  Despite the seaborne tragedy of the afternoon, by evening the annual festival is well underway. Even in the midst of the festival the pair of visiting elves that this version of me has invited to meet me here wear their dark and starry robes. It is our first time meeting in person but they believe I am who I say I am. We talk and wander the festival, seeing the sights, shopping the stalls, indulging in the games, and partaking in the food and drink. The festive atmosphere does its work alongside the preceding months of schorly correspondence to loosen the elves’ tongues on topics they would normally know better than to go on about. I steer the conversation toward the topic of magic and they are only too eager to enumerate the shortcomings of modern human approaches to its study. First and foremost of our follies – according to them – is the human insistence on treating magic like yet another one of the hard sciences like physics or chemistry. They cim it is why so many of the rge scale magic projects run by humans end so disastrously. More frustratingly difficult to get them to spill is what their alternative approach is, but by the end of the night I have gathered fragments dispersed between enough changes in topic and festive distractions to keep them from noticing just how much they’re telling me.

  These fragments, once assembled with the greater context I have gathered in our prior correspondence will be enough to make my fortune.