Discovery Gaming Community

(Prelude)


The southern wharf of Ile du Palais was busy as ever with the numerous workers of various colours of collar sped past in their daily duties. The rush of the working day contrasted with the building that Dia Augustopolou leaned against and its purpose. The white, neoclassical edifice of the National Library of Gallia seemed quaint and out of place in the wharf, a place of commerce and transport. The library was just a few streets away from the headquarters of Ile-de-France Shipping, the corporation she had worked for just a week ago.

The true purpose of her prolonged stay in Gallia — finding Petros Katsouranis — did not move an inch during her tenure at IDF, where she had hoped to make meanignful connections. Her bet on IDF did not pay off, as the corp faced tough times and nobody with the means of finding the former ambassador would give her the time of day. They were either looking to save themselves like rats from the sinking ship of the ancient Gallic logistics company or did everything in their power to stop it.

At the end of the day, she did not care about the fate of IDF in the slightest. The relations between Gallia and Crete started to sour and she realised that she would need to act quickly if she were to return home with her shield. A contact she had managed to make while she was at IDF, the seasoned Gallic Navy admiral Vaillant, had offered to help by letting her access the archives of the Gallic Bibliothèque. It was a long shot, and she would grasp at any straw she could get a hold of.

The ordinary part of the Library, filled with both paper and digital copies of various works of ancient French and Gallic literature, was frequented by many a scholar and student, especially those from the nearby Nouvelle-Sorbonne, the oldest institution of higher learning in Gallia. The less ordinary and more restricted section consisted of the Gallic national archives, which collected all the documents and sensitive written material pertaining to matters of Gallic national security. Access to the archives was only granted under exceptional circumstances to people not affiliated with the machinery of the Gallic state.

She hoped that the dark-haired man who had just disembarked a taxicab would create such exceptional circumstances.

She was surprised at the number of security personnel in the library itself. The largest such institution back on Crete, the library near a small town of Alexandria, had barely any, and was mostly run by monks. Shortly before the admiral came in, she had browsed through the shelves and found a copy of selected Aesop's Fables. She took it to the table nearby and browsed through it. She was familiar with most of them, having read them in Greek several times in her youth, and just to kill time she tried to deduce the meaning of individual words of the French edition — and mostly failing, as she hadn't picked up much of the language during her time in Gallia.

The words over her shoulder interrupted the exercise. She glanced at their source, and recognising the face that she had seen a few times already in comms, closed the book and stood up. "Admiral," she nodded in greeting and pointed at the book. "Magical how our cultures can somehow still engage with each other, across thousands of years of time and space..."

She put the book away back on the shelf that she took it from and turned back towards the admiral, transitioning from her scholarly demeanour to a more military one, since she remembered that she used to hold the equal rank to the Admiral himself, albeit in a different navy. "I'm grateful you could make the time," she put her hands behind back.

Dia raised an eyebrow at the admiral's words, keeping her back stiff and hands on the table.

"I did notice the number of armed people around," she spoke rather quietly. "It is quite odd to see, but I suppose you have your reasons. I'm uncertain, though, whether you have the necessary skills to understand the embassy's documents. I would imagine that most of the official documentation was translated to English or French, but if there is anything that would hint to the plans of the ambassador in the fading days of the Kingdom that he expected me or one of our people to find, it would be not just in Greek but probably in some kind of code."

She shrugged. "Are you sure that there is absolutely no way for me to have a look at them?"

Dia nodded as he stood up. "I'll take what I can get. Thank you."

She retrieved a few torn pieces of paper and a pencil from her purse. She had a Gallic pre-paid PAD on her as well, but she preferred analogue means of recording information, as they were inherently more difficult to trace and surveil. She doodled a few animals on one of them, waiting for the admiral to return.

Eventually he did, carrying a small folder of papers and a memory diamond. There were free consoles available for students at the library, but she would rather avoid accessing them and the content of the diamond. There was not enough time and the written notes would probably contain more information.

"Thank you, Admiral," she spoke, taking the folder from his hands. She placed it on the table, opened it and reviewed its contents. Vaillant watched her carefully, she felt he did not trust her with the documents. Neither did she trust him — operating under the suspicion that his readiness to help her was not dictated by the goodness of heart. "I'll do my best to get through this quickly."

The folder contained a number of printed documents in French, English and Greek. It seemed like each language version contained the same information and they were just translations of each other. The only difference was that some of the documents in Greek contained highlights and notes handwritten in pencil. She put aside all of the French documents and placed the English and Greek ones side by side in front of her, glossing over the contents.

A large number of the files were useless: internal memos, shopping lists, construction contracts, proposals of cultural exchange programs, among others. Only two papers piqued her interest. The first one was a memo detailing the staff that would be brought in from Crete, another contained the details of the embassy evacuation following the news of the Council fleet breaching New Paris. It appeared from the memos that the non-essential Custodi staff was successfully evacuated and reached Crete safely, however there was still a small contingent left behind. She did not recognise any of the names, but she knew there was little chance that anyone besides Katsouranis would have made it out alive. She noted down the names anyway, hoping that she could look into this further later.

Nothing that she saw gave her any tips as to the Ambassador's current whereabouts. She sighed, drummed her fingers on the table. Her eyes wandered towards the memory diamond, but she had hoped that by this point she would have found something. The Admiral must have noticed her upset expression.

She must have missed something. She carefully went through the two documents again, looking for patterns in the wording or letters, but there was nothing that she could decipher. She shook her head.

After a few tense minutes, in a last ditch effort, she put away the English and Greek file and picked up the French one. She intended to ask the admiral to help her with deciphering the language, but before she could do it, from among the ruffled pages an unfastened, handwritten page fell out and dropped onto the table.

The note was written in Ancient Greek, a variety of the language only learned and understood by consummate scholars. This fact, and the elegant and condensed cursive, made her believe that it was Katsouranis himself who wrote the note. She understood very little, but she stared at the note for a good few minutes trying to make sense of it, eventually realising that it was a short story, condensed into a single paragraph.

At that point she recalled a book that she had read years before, as a teenager. The book told the story of a couple of families living under an oppressive regime that censored all of correspondence and literature, as well as restricted the use of encryption. In order to evade the censors, the families in the book communicated with one another by writing stories with animal characters, much like Aesop's fables, which utilised broad symbolism to conceal their true meaning.

Through that lens, she eventually managed to decipher the message. The story was a short day in the life of an insect that, on a hot day, saved itself from the scorching sun by biting into an book and making his shelter there. She took it to mean what she already knew, that she should look for answers in a library... But there was nothing else here. Knowing that she must have missed something, she read through the paragraph again and again. Eventually she started scribbling on her paper, hastily transcribing the note while changing some letter forms and using synonyms so that it did not resemble the original too much, to read and research later.

Exasperated she whispered under her breath. "Tipota, tipota!" She wanted to collect her thoughts and go through the papers another time, but the admiral stood up. She understood that her time with the archival documents was over.

Dia glanced at the admiral and took one last look at the note, then placed it back in among the papers. "Well, I guess you are right," she spoke with exasperation. "I suppose I will have to continue this on my own."

She gathered the documents and placed them back into the folder. She paused for a few seconds to compose herself before handing it to Vaillant. "Nevertheless, I appreciate the favour. I hope to make it up to you one day."

As Valliant went off to confer with another guard and put the documents in their place in the archives, she studied the jottings that she had written that were a crude copy of Katsouranis's note. Unable to make any more sense of it, she put it in her pocket.

She intended to stay in the library for a little longer and look for inspiration. She wanted to say her goodbyes to Vaillant and continue her musings alone, but the conversation with the guard took longer than she had expected. She wandered off, looking at the various books on the shelves.

The shelves closest to her contained fables and historical fairy tales. She continued further, towards philosophy, then metaphysics, then ancient history. She crossed an aisle and turned a corner, walking past a section on music and then medicine. The categorisation of paper books seemed to make little sense for her but there undoubtedly was some sort of method to how they were arranged. Eventually, she reached the entrance and the front desk.

Behind it a young woman tirelessly scrolled through pages and pages of images and short videos on her PAD. Not wanting to interrupt, Dia stood a little to the side and studied the holographic board behind the desk. The news on it changed every few seconds, showing both news from all around Gallia, as well as more local items, pertaining to the library itself and the events it hosted.

There was information about an upcoming poetry reading, then it scrolled past a few items she did not understand. The larger section in the centre of the board switched more slowly, showing recent news of the Metz famines. Then, something appeared in the corner of the board. She paused, glanced around, and looked harder. What?


She did not recognise the name, but the face was unmistakably the one of Petros Katsouranis. Bearded, lacking glasses and with a different haircut, sure, but she recognised the old ambassador immediately. Still, she was uncertain if the eyes weren't deceiving her.

Then she thought back to the note that he had left her and immediately realised her error. Her initial interpretation was that she was supposed to look for information in the library. But, being the ambassador, he must have known at the time of the liquidation of the embassy that the documentation would have been placed in the Bibliothèque's archives. It was not information that she was supposed to find in the library, it was the ambassador himself. She could only marvel at the realisation.

The dots took her a few excruciatingly long seconds to connect. She glanced at the woman behind the desk to see if she had noticed anything about her behaviour, but the woman was firmly glued to the screen of the PAD. Attempting to compose herself and disguise the immense relief that she felt, she turned on her heel and noticed Vaillant walking towards her. She remembered that she had never revealed a photo of the ambassador to the admiral. She decided to keep her findings to herself.