Memo 017: (R1)Veiled scriptures.

Nagisa fiddled with Camera in her lap, her lips pressed tight. Finally, she glanced to Yuranu, her voice breaking the stillness.

“Hey, Yuranu… do you happen to know anything about… telepathy?” Yuranu blinked, her sharp ears twitching. “Telepathy? What?”

Nagisa shifted uncomfortably. “Like… someone speaking directly into your brain. No sound. No lips moving. Just… there. In your head.” Yuranu tilted her head, tail swishing lazily. “Never heard of it. All mahouist have abilities that can be seen. The veil, slave seal, vocalism. Even the strangest ones—threads, illusions, curses—you see them in some way.” She leaned back, crossing her arms. “But a voice in the skull? No. That’s not Veylstra magic. At least, not any I’ve heard of.”

Nagisa frowned, chewing on the inside of her cheek. “So then… what I heard back there…”

The demonlike will never be controlled… you should be careful.

It was insane to think about. Even in her old world—with its satellites, scanners, and endless surveillance—nobody had ever figured out how to speak directly into the brain. That sort of thing belonged in pulp novels, in science fiction, not in the mouth of a monarch. Her pen scratched against her memo pad, filling a page with hurried strokes.

—The King. Telepathy.

—Impossible. Yet real.

—Entities around him. Different from the rest..

Nagisa shut the pad with a snap, pulse hammering. If Yuranu was right, if no Veylstran magic explained it… then what had brushed against her mind in that hall?

Nagisa pressed her lips together, her thoughts coiling dark.

The king was something else.

Something other.

And she was the only one who knew it.

Looking in her sleeve to find the photo she took off him had vanished. 

Inner Veylstra loomed like a stone labyrinth, spires clawing the gray sky, the streets teeming with merchants and soldiers, yet always with that suffocating hush beneath the noise. The stagecoach rolled through its gates and stopped before the company building—an austere fortress of brick and iron.

Nateas didn’t say a word. He stepped down, chains rattling faintly as he brushed past them, his eyes half-lidded, avoiding Nagisa’s stare. Yano and Serenya step off the stagecoach, yano giving nagisa an unpleasant look. "I hope you know what you're doing." Nagisa snapping a picture of the two and hands it to them. "You two look cute together." Yano looking at serenya as she looks at him holding her face. "Dont change the subject, we need to talk about you and that demon. Nagisa begins walking away telling them as she walks towards her building. "My bodyguard and there's nothing to say. 

Bu.....but....

Nagisa turns around with a resolute look on her face. "I need him. His strength is the real deal. And in my line of work what's real....is what's best. She takes a bow and tells the two. 

"Please understand."

Yano wants to get a word in. But serenya stops him. The same words echoed at the beginning. "When a girls got her mind made up, that's it...." 

Inside the company building, silence fell heavy.  Nagisa blinked. She half-expected some snide comment, some jab, but he’d left nothing but silence behind. "Guess the demonill needs his beauty sleep,” Camera muttered. That left Nagisa, Yuranu, and Camera in the board room—a chamber lined with a map of inner veylstra, and shelves of heavy ledgers that smelled of old paper and mildew. Nagisa’s boots clicked against the polished stone floor, her nerves still buzzing from the king’s phantom voice.

Yuranu pressed her hand to her stomach, face pale. Her breaths came ragged, and then—slowly—she leaned over the polished table. Something wet splattered against the wood. Nagisa recoiled, her stomach lurching as Yuranu gagged, throat convulsing, and began spitting out the doctrine. Long strips of damp parchment, ink blurred and stained with bile, slid from her lips like wrung-out rags. They slapped against the boardroom surface with a noise far too human to be paper alone.

Her saliva webbed the text, glistening in the lamplight. Letters crawled across the page like insects disturbed, rearranging themselves as though aware of being seen. Camera’s lens whirred nervously. “Boss… that was in the cellar, wasn’t it? The thing she—ate?”

Yuranu wiping her face noting "If that sly fox wanted it that badly and the king also wanted it then there'd be some worth doing this." 

This was their reward. The evidence. Proof that the whispers weren’t just paranoia. But Nagisa couldn’t shake the cold crawling sensation along her spine. Something in her told her that even reading too much of it might twist her own mind, that it was better left untouched. Still, a reporter’s duty was never about comfort. She steadied her pen. Focus, Nagisa. You got what you came for. But one thing still needs to be done. Her voice cracked into the silence. “The denizens need to know. All of them. The restaurant they loved so much—the one they flocked to, smiled in, felt safe in—it wasn’t what they thought. It had something darker… hidden beneath.”

Yuranu, pale and exhausted from what she’d just expelled, leaned against the table. “what do you want to do with it publish it? Against the will of the crown?” Nagisa bit her lip, but her eyes glowed with conviction. “If we don’t tell them, we’re just as guilty as the ones who buried it there. We start with the people. Then… we work our way up. To the king himself.”

Yuranu tilted her head, strands of silver hair sticking to her cheek where sweat hadn’t dried. Her amber eyes were sharp, almost mocking. "I understand your excitement but the king had a point." “You think they’ll care, Nagisa? The denizens? About what festers under their tables and bowls? They won’t. They’ll close their eyes and clap for their next meal. They’ll say it isn’t their problem.”

Nagisa froze at first—because Yuranu was right. “In all my years of reporting…” she began, her tone low, almost sermon-like, “there’s a reason for this work. A true one. It was never just money, or prestige. Waking people up—yes, that’s important. But the real purpose of reporting, of journalism—” she thumped the tip of her pen against the doctrine— “is to awaken more reporters. To teach people to see. To pass the torch." Yuranu frowned, her sharpness softening into something contemplative. “You mean… to make them like you? To make them question and never sleep peacefully again?”

Nagisa met her gaze, cheeks faintly flushed but unflinching. “Exactly. That’s what terrifies the king more than anything else. Not one truth. But a chain reaction of them.

Nagisa and Yuranu sat shoulder to shoulder, the heavy doctrine creaking as Nagisa pried it open on the boardroom table. The parchment smelled faintly of smoke and iron, the ink etched so deep it seemed carved into the page itself.

But when they leaned in—

Nagisa blinked. Once. Twice. Her breath hitched.

The letters weren’t letters. The words weren’t words. They slipped away the instant her eyes tried to lock onto them, like oil retreating from water. Her vision hazed, her mind stumbling against a wall that shouldn’t have been there. She rubbed her eyes with the heel of her palm, but when she looked again, it was worse. The text twisted in on itself, shapes collapsing and reforming into something indecipherable, something her brain refused to pin down.

Yuranu hissed under her breath, slamming the book shut for a moment. “It’s like it doesn’t want us to see it. Like it knows we’re looking.” Her forked tongue flicked between her teeth as though to taste the air, unsettled. Nagisa swallowed hard, a bead of sweat trickling down her temple. “No… it’s not that we can’t read it. It’s that we’re not meant to. Camera whirred faintly at her side, its shutter clicking once, then twice, but the instant photo that printed was nothing but white static. Nagisa shook her head. "Truth is meant for the people. If we can’t read this…” She glanced down at the still-shut doctrine, almost afraid it would open on its own. “…then we just haven’t found who it’s for.”

Nagisa folded the doctrine closed with more force than necessary, the sound like a verdict in the hollow boardroom.“We have to find someone who can lift this,” she said, voice low and certain. “If they put this much work into hiding what’s written here.That means there’s an answer. Someone can crack it. We just have to find them.”Yuranu nonchalantly did not have an answer. “You think the answer’s handing itself over? A blind scholar? A mahouist who specialises in perception wards?” Her tail flicked. “This is Veylstra. The people who hide things don’t usually put signs up pointing to the key.”

Nagisa pressed her hand against the doctrine one last time before slipping it into the satchel at her side. It thrummed faintly, like a heart that didn’t belong to her, resisting even being carried. She ignored the chill crawling up her wrist. “We’ll start with the sealing mahouist,” she said, almost to herself. “If anyone knows about perception barriers, it’s someone who writes them for a living. Maybe they can give us a lead… or at least tell us what kind of curse we’re up against.” Yuranu tilted her head, eyes narrowing in thought. “Sealing mahouists don’t talk cheap. If the king’s involved, they’ll be twice as careful.” A smirk curved her lips, revealing a fang. “But I can be… persuasive.”

Nagisa managed a faint smile, though her heart was still thudding from the earlier haze. She adjusted Camera's strap across her shoulder and scribbled into her memo pad: Target — sealing mahouist. Location — ask around the eastern quarter. Possible lead.

For the first time since they’d returned to Inner Veylstra, she felt her hands stop trembling. The path forward wasn’t clear, but it was there. “Then that’s settled,” she said, standing with a journalist’s stubborn certainty. “We find the one who built this kind of wall. We find the crack. And when we do—” her voice lowered, steely “—we’ll know what was worth hiding.”

The two of them left the boardroom, leaving nateas to stew in whatever misery he laid himself. Their silhouettes swallowed by the corridors of the company’s keep. Outside, the lamps of Inner Veylstra flickered against the deep night, casting the city in gold and shadow. Somewhere in its streets was the key they needed, and perhaps the noose tightening around their necks. Nagisa held her satchel close. For the first time, she felt the story she’d chosen to chase wasn’t just hers anymore—it was something clawing toward her from beneath the words themselves.