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[Isk]

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“Have you ever been exhausted? You walk up the steps after a day of eating poorly and working your body to the limit, that headache that comes when your mind wants to tell you to just lie down. But you don’t want to lay down, not this time. So you keep going about your day, a little hunting here, a visit to a friend and the next thing you know even your eyes are starting to tell you things. You start to see black while riding along paths of Sosaria, then when you shake it off you see those little white sparks that race and sprinkle down your vision. White sparks, but Im not exhausted.” Isk spoke into the wind, finding a need to express his thoughts with speech over letting his ideas bounce around in his mind. “And I’ve been seeing them for days”

Earlier it would have been the Helm of Evil that the porcelain masked Magnate spoke over. His hands fumbling it about as if trying to converse with an animated listener. On this particular night Isk held the steering wheel of his ship the Legacy, a tiny white spark dropping in his line of vision like a falling star and equally untouchable though not because it was far but because it was a hallucination.

“Or is it a hallucination?” He reflected as he adjusted the ship’s angle making a curve around the north eastern tip of Magincia sailing the ship southward over the dark waters, the moon his only source of light shining down upon the ship as if some great being in the heavens was watching him.

“Do Alizia and Mark suspect anything now that they have had time to think about the questions I had asked Could a blood disease be triggered later on in someone’s life?” He shook his head to have a strand of his white silver hair fall back into place, his mask crowned by the thick mane of hair.

“And what did she say to you, to you and your lovely wife?” Isk lowered his voice to answer his own question “Drugs, alcohol and a number of other things including previous sicknesses could trigger a dormant ailment”

He brought his eyebrows together under his mask, his face quizzical beneath the emotionless porcelain. “Drugs, Utopia, perhaps she suspected it then and there when the question was asked. Why else would she have said that?”

* * * * *

Two hours had passed since he called up one of the sailors to pilot the vessel. Isk sat cross legged in a meditative position over a blanc piece of paper on the wooden floor of his cabin, the whiteness blemished by a yellowish stain near the center of the torn page. Beside the yellow stain he wrote his name Isk in brown ink. Leaning back to view the space around himself on the paper he took care to write Angelique to his right side, switching ink to write in red underneath it ‘she knows’
Above his name to the left the names Mark and Alizia Randerstill were written in brown under which red was used to mark the words ‘they suspect’. The familiar name Bleen the Green was next placed on the very top right hand corner of the paper and below it the words ‘could be helpful’. Rubbing the chin of his mask Isk connected his name to Angelique, pausing he connected Mark and Alizia to himself as well glancing up and attaching Angelique to Bleen knowing that his wife would try to seek out the elusive scholar.

“There is something missing” Isk stated as he glanced at all the empty space. Trying to not let his emotions get the best of him Isk dabbled his quill into the red ink and wrote Mother and Father directly over his own name only to realize he should have used brown and save the red for the description to keep the thought web uniform. 'Don’t know them, could be the cause’ The words seemed strange as he wrote them under the tiny space between his name and theirs. Knowing this was a pointless lead he refrained from connecting his parents to himself on the paper. With a reluctant hand Isk finally wrote the last name on the page. HUMANIS the title fully capitalized the description below it in much smaller letters ‘Hereditary blood poison could discredit you’ then after a moment the added words ‘Don’t let them know anything yet’ Connecting Humanis to himself.

Setting the paper on his desk to have the ink dry Isk finally mused to himself, his tone so much like a drunk defending his addiction with valiant words “Opium and Utopia have no control over my body, this is in my blood.”