From Dr. Blevins:
Thanks for your illuminating feedback. For classified reasons, 1045 works better for us than the 1190s do. Assuming language immersion will indeed work for Tristan, let’s send him back there ASAP.
From Dr. Stokes:
What are “classified reasons”? How could they be so classified that neither Tristan (the probable DOer in question) nor myself (the linguistic historian expressly in charge of determining these matters) is being told about them?
Can we CC in General Frink and Dr. Oda to this thread in case they can shed light on either Chronotropic or top-level-strategic reasons for not doing the sensible thing here?
From Dr. Blevins:
Mel, thank you as always for your spirited commentary. There is no need to trouble either General Frink or Dr. Oda in this case. The answer is straightforward: training our “Varangian Guard” candidates close to the time of the Constantinople DTAP is dangerous because, however remote their “hometown,” they could still be recognized. That is why to choose a spot not only temporally but also geographically isolated from 1200 Constantinople.
Other issues in this decision are above your pay grade so you don’t need to know.
DODO MEMORANDUM
CLARIFICATION TO DRESS CODE
BY MACY STOLL, MBA
POSTED Day 653
The distribution of DODO’s newly minted dress code has brought in a flood of requests for clarification. Until such time as this document can be reworded, here is a useful rule of thumb: DOers on active missions are exempt from all dress code provisions, including the requirement to wear anything at all.
LETTER FROM
GRáINNE to GRACE O’MALLEY
Winter Solstice, 1601
Auspiciousness and prosperity to you, milady!
I pray Your Grace will forgive my few months of silence, for wasn’t it in a terrible way I found myself, trying to secure safety and security after the disaster of the lomadh. Rose it was sent Tristan Lyons back to his era, and wasn’t I glad to see the back of him for a while.
But only for a while, Your Majesty. For I’ve landed on my feet, and determined I am to learn the truth behind what Tristan be up to. When he “told me everything,” truly ’twasn’t everything at all, or else why would that right arse Les Holgate appear and make such a muck of everything? There are things going on in the future, and it’s to do with magic, and ’tis the least Tristan Lyons can do but be fully honest with me at last, now that he and his like have robbed me of all I cherish in London.
But as I said, it’s safety I’ve found for myself, and at the merest cost. I’ve told Your Majesty in years past of Francis Bacon’s society of Good Pens (’tis a pun on the male member, is what I’m thinking, given what I know of Sir Francis). This group meets at Gray’s Inn, and composed of the brightest of menfolk it is, them being intelligencers and counterfeiters, not to mention secretaries, physicians, poets, theologians, apothecaries, and the occasional natural philosopher, and of these last few, doesn’t Sir Francis love to debate with the nature of the universe, in ways that seem like conversations witches might have with each other, if witches were wont to waste their time putting into words things which go without saying. There are no witches in their discourses and indeed no women at all! Like a bunch of turtles trying to discuss flight, they remind me of, and not getting all of it correct, neither.
But sure it’s entertainment enough. Don’t I keep my mouth shut when I’m near them and pour the ale; they are the best minds in London, and one of them natural philosophers with a mystical bent, one Jacques Cardigan (a mad enough fellow with a mad enough name!) has taken me in as a servant, and Your Ladyship will understand that I warm his bed when he asks for me, but it’s an easier life than posing as a bawd, so it is. Himself is a wealthy enough fella, although an obvious Catholic (what with a French name and his surname coming from a Catholic shire in Wales, he can hardly hide it, can he?), so he keeps out of politics and that may in the end mean I must move on to other quarters, for to be of use to Your Grace. But for now it’s safety and security and no questions asked—sure he thinks he’s landed in it, here’s a pretty Irish refugee who will give him pleasure in exchange for room and board, and not be questioning his religion neither!
He’s a summer house in Surrey, in Norwich, and we’ll be retiring there come spring, if I’m still under his roof then, but through winter we’re near enough to Gray’s Inn. Rose knows my circumstances and conveyed them to Tristan, so I’ve let him know I’m pleased to continue to help him knot his network of witches, and it seems to have grown with breathtaking speed, so it has. I’ve stopped asking him questions directly, though, and it’s trying to learn a bit by observation I am now. For it seems to me that he knows precisely what it is that brought magic to its knees, and it seems to me that if I might know it too, I might hoist him by his own petard (to quote that poxy playwright)—I could be using his own strategy of moving around through time and space, not to bring back magic but to prevent its cessation in the first place. I’ve no idea how to make that so, and it’s cagey enough he’s being with his information, but I’ve naught else to do with my time now that I’m away from Whitehall circles, so I mean to figure it out.
The one thing I’m knowing for certain is that in his ever-expanding fellowship of witches, Tristan occasionally runs into an ornery one who needs to be coaxed into the congregation (and sure why shouldn’t they? I would have been demanding some coaxing, if I didn’t foolishly think I could benefit from him as much as him from me.). At this moment of time, himself and some other DOers are romping about the universe trying to please some Wending woman in Antwerp who lived some fifty years back (and who had some connection to that banker fellow, Gresham—and therefore somehow-or-other to my new friend Bacon, for didn’t Sir Thomas Gresham’s bastard daughter marry Sir Francis’s half-brother? Is right she did. And of course I’m sure the Fuggers are involved in all of this somehow, they always are.).