“Yes, yes. You did very well. Thank you.” Alice took the book to her desk and began to rapidly scrawl yet another document, assigning Melissa Bellum as her personal guard. She finished by signing it, and set it aside in the pile of new documents pertaining to the one-eyed girl.

“Now… What to do…?” The blonde was mostly talking to herself, racking her brain for the next thing to do. That was her way. Always assessing what had yet to be done and planning on how to do it. After some thought, she came to the next step.

Alice stood up suddenly and hurried to the other side of the room, fetching a map of the continent from a pile of them she’d had produced en masse in case of a new Crusade. As it happened, they would be put to good use.

Clearing off her desk by placing all the books in piles on the ground and all the papers in drawers, she set down the map and fetched a brush because the paper was larger so a quill’s writing would be much too small.

“Here,” she said, pointing to Crescentia on the map, “is where we are. The capital is here, and the castle we’re in, which is the main castle, is right here. Now,” she looked at Melissa hopefully, “do you remember where roughly the Ultimatum is based, or any significant locations where they might be? Any common attack routes or strategies are helpful too, if you can remember anything…”

Alice didn’t want to come off as demanding, but there was a certain rush in her tone, inevitably. There was little to do about that, though.