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Jon meant to go outside, find a garden or, even better, walk to the Thames, let the walk calm him.

But instead the door that should have lead to the side alley led here, where there are too many people and too many unknowns.

So Jon takes himself outside, where at least the landscape has a somewhat familiar feel to it, and the air is cool enough to be distracting. He ignores how his hands shake as he fumbles for a cigarette, fumbles to get the flame to catch.

He tells himself that he doesn't believe it. That Gertrude Robinson was an old woman, and even if she had died at her desk, like Rosie had hinted at months before, it was probably just natural causes. That it didn't have anything to do with that worrying sense of being watched. That Elias was just a pompous over-educated git who was vague because it sounded more upper-crust, not because he was purposefully avoiding the word 'murder'.

He doesn't believe himself even a little.

And he resists the urge to read the statement he has tucked in his pocket again. He'll have to eventually, for the recording, but... later.

Later.

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[[OPC: Are characters that are currently AU welcome, or would you prefer for Jon to meet the regular version later?]]

((OOC: All are welcome, though if he gets an AU pup, expect him to be Highly Suspicious and Prone To Asking Questions, as Jon doesn't like secrets to begin with, and is liking them less the longer he has his current job. And the longer he has his current job, the harder it will be to tell him anything less than the full truth, so... dealer's choice!))

[[OPC: The charries, of course, believe themselves to be exactly what they present themselves as, so more of a mystery than a secret here. I will risk it.]]

There's a young man in white robes with some sort of blue emblem stencilled over the shoulders, sitting on a large log and reading a small book.

He looks at Jon with wide-eyed amazement. That is a novel way of burning incense, and such a strange scent!

Here, he'll do one better - one he has the cigarette lit, and the lighter put away (a somewhat gaudy thing, gold-plated, with a spider-web design), he inhales, blowing out a thin stream of smoke a moment later.

The young man stares rudely for a moment, then casts down his eyes, wondering at the very strange incense.

Or is it more like moxibustion? In the lungs?

"That's not mugwort, is it?" he blurts out.

Jon startles, too used to the casual way strangers ignore each other in a large city.

"Huh? Oh. Um. No." He stumbles over his words as he pulls himself out of his tumbling thoughts. "Just a cigarette."

"I never heard of it," the young man says, still bewildered. "Our doctors use mugwort to burn on you when you're sick."

He gets to his feet quickly and bows to Jon, arms held in a circle in front of his chest.

"Excuse my manners and my curiosity! I am called Meng Yao, outer disciple of the Qinghe Nie sect, at Cloud Recesses for the guest lectures."

In Meng Yao's worldview, that apparently explains him completely.

Huh? Jon blinks at this absolute slew of nearly incomprehensible information.

"Um... Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London." He can at least manage to return the introduction, though he's not at all certain it will help. "What lectures?"

"Guest lectures on the advanced principles and practice of qi cultivation, by the masters of the Lan sect, at their compound Cloud Recesses, near Caiyi town in Gusu," Meng Yao says.

"Um... sounds... good?" He understood 'lectures' and has a vague idea what 'qi' is, and puts them together as some sort of Eastern medicine conference thing. To be fair, he's not entirely wrong.

"It's a great honour that I was allowed to stay," Meng Yao says, meekly proud or proudly meek. "I wasn't meant to, but young Master Lan asked me. I am learning so much."

Edited 2020-09-23 17:56 (UTC)

Must be a paid thing, which... you know, not unusual, or so he's heard. He hasn't actually gone to any job-related conferences, and hasn't quite worked up the nerve to ask Elias about it.

"Well, um... that's good?" Better than wasting your time, surely.

"Oh, it is very good, and I'm very glad about it," Meng Yao says. "But, if you would excuse me, what are these things that are not mugwort good for?"

There must be some medicinal or magical use, as the smell is rather unpleasant.

"The cigarettes? Not good for much, according to the NHS." Jon huffs a laugh, mostly at himself. He managed to kick the habit once, but the stress of the new job brought back old habits.

"Then why...?"

"It's a habit, I like them, they're there?" Jon offers with a shrug, dearly hoping that he hasn't run into some anti-smoking crusader. He's sure they mean well, but they can mean well somewhere else.

Meng Yao doesn't even know what smoking is.

"Like some people always, I don't know, fluttering their fan even when it's not hot?" he guesses, quoting the slightly annoying habit of someone close to him.

"... I guess so?" Jon hasn't really met anyone with a fan, fluttering or not, so... he's making a vaguely educated guess.

Very vaguely.

"Though that sounds more like a nervous tic than anything else."

"What is the difference?"

"That this isn't a nervous tic." Jon shrugs, tapping off the ash before taking another drag.

"Yes, thank you," Meng Yao says, understanding exactly nothing.

"Ah, Jon!" A completely joe average Zenigata is waving from the bar. "Are you normal, my friend, or have you been replaced with someone far more magical than usual? It'd been a bit strange about here!"

At least now Jon will be informed that something is Weird.

Is this place ever not weird?

"Someone... magical." Jon echos, sounding like he both wants to know and really really hopes that Zenigata was joking, and there's nothing to know.

"Yeah, just out here for a magical smoke break."

"So your normal, archivist self?" Zenigata relaxes slightly, before he comes over, freshly lit cigarette of his own in his mouth. "But you're normal and you're not going on about Quidditch, so --eh, lunch? You can tell me a story from home! Any new artefacts?"

Yet, this is just the normal Zenigata. Just say, 'Hey, you've gotten anything as interesting as the icecube that's actually hyper-dense plutonium? How about magical gems?' Because he needs someone who can talk about the weird shit you deal with investigating things.

"None of that. We have recently found a bag of what appear to be sharks' teeth, accompanying a statement taken from a man who claimed to be a vampire killer. The biologist we contacted, however, cannot identify the species the vampire came from." Jon has found that the worst things ever found tend to look mundane, like something that could have easily been part of your life and never remarked on.

"Shark teeth on a vampire?" Zenigata grimace, muscles in his neck going tight for a second before he relaxes them. "I don't want to even imagine such a thing that'd..." Sucking blood would mean the victim end up like a caseless sausage fresh from grinder.

"Lupin faked being a vampire a couple of times for heists," he says, taking this to a FAR lighter topic. "But... you know, we haven't crossed paths with one yet. Ghost, mermaids, aliens, yes. Vampires, no."

"They probably are just sharks' teeth." Jon notes, firmly - even outside of the Institute, he still has that weird back-of-the-neck feeling of being watched sometimes.

He really doesn't want to give it the satisfaction of seeing him spooked.

"How in the world would being a vampire help you steal something?"

"Sometimes it's thematic, sometimes it's whim. Part of the problem of predicting Lupin is that he's hard to predict," Zenigata says with a wry smile, eyes glinting for a moment, like a wolf that just caught the scent of fresh meat. "That's why he's Lupin III and not just some petty criminal. He's a master at his lawlessness! It'd be admirable if it wasn't crime."

"Uh huh." Jon blinks at the wave of praise. "He, uh... know you like him so much?"

"We respect each other!" Zenigata huffs, before he takes up his cigarette for a drag off it. He exhales slowly, before he says, "As rivals. My duty is to bring him in and make sure he serves justice. But damned if he doesn't make it challenging!"

Zenigata enjoys his work, that's all. Anyone should be so lucky to enjoy their job!

Jon's expression will not win any poker tournaments - he may not entirely 'get' the non-asexual experience, but he's seen it plenty. Zenigata might be fooling himself, but he's kinda doing a horrible job fooling anyone else. Poor Lupin.

"Um... yes. Challenging." Sure.

Rude. Zenigata looks away, as he taps off ash from the tip of his cigarette, unconcerned whether or not Jon believes him.

"If you have a worthy foe, or someone who drives you to achieve, you'll get it," he says. "...but I imagine that's hard to come by in archiving."

"No archiving Olympics, that I know of." Jon agrees with a wry sort of sideways grin.

Zenigata's smile easily revives as he cants his head back and laughs. "What would it even entail? Speed statements? Or creative book shelving? Partnered book finding? Artefact wrangling?"

Hwe can imagine a lot of those, and how funny they'd all be to watch.

"We might fail at every other category, but we'd definitely take the gold in artefact wrangling." Jon decides - look, the archives are an absolute mess, but artefact storage is a virtual fortress.

"At least you'll have one to take home, then," he said with a grin. He doesn't know what to think of why that must be. They must have one hell of a collection and even better team if they need to be that good. "One's not shabby, is it?"

"Ah, that' you'll have to take up with the boss, he does get cranky if someone suggests the Magnus Institute isn't the best at all things." It's one of those things Jon doesn't get at all - if Elias was so concerned about the state of his Institute, shouldn't he have put someone in charge of the archives who knew something about archiving? Sasha is right there.

It's made everything so awkward and stressful.

"All bosses are like that," Zenigata reassures him. "I like to think my team's the best in the business, but I'm sure some would disagree."

After all, Lupin frequently escapes! What's to be proud of there? But the things he leaves in his wakes, the bigger fish that are suddenly clubbed on the shore? Zenigata snaps them up and puts them away. Sometimes he feels like a janitor, cleaning up Lupin's messes... but sometimes he feels great seeing someone so much worse that Lupin get what he deserves.

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