[h3][color=9e005d]Doc Siward[/color][/h3]
Still hoping for a restful day, Siward already had heavy thoughts to sort through and interrogate before his rendezvous with Devin nonetheless. Travel always left one out of the loop, but today he had been thrust back into the very same loop sooner than he'd had the chance to fill himself in properly. Fortunately, some aspects of town life never changed, and the Doc knew them well, saw them shuffling in the corner of his eye wherever people were gathered.

Certain corners of Medburn, as many other towns, had with time grown into nooks more distinctive than any building that could replace them. 'The abandoned mill', 'The knotted tree,' 'The corner of Wagon Street'... Places to meet that grew into places to scheme in public privacy, where dealers met their clients to pass on 'candy', where forbidden teenagers could arrange a few hours away from prying parents. Inevitably, these crannies accumulated graffiti, and what passed for vandalism too casually prolific and too out-of-the-way to clean became a code.

The collapsed well that had been Medburn's unofficial message-pole had since been replaced with a construction site, and a particularly shoddy one at that, directly adjacent to the public library. Not that it had stopped anyone. Siward ran his hand over the scratched, scrawled and painted tags and recognised their style, looked over his shoulder and at the library windows to ensure that he was unseen, then took out a stem of fresh mulberries from his coat and crushed them.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

On a forgotten wall in a lonely building that would no doubt never be completed, a new purple scrawl accompanied dozens of others, passing perfectly as the usual illegible name-tags left by the arrogant and reckless. Four mangled symbols connected by a loose underline, one a combination of several angles that indicated the day and month, respectively, and a time; one a backwards, wobbly, looped-up rendition of the name 'Mizu', distorted until only someone used to the method could read it. The third and fourth were a little more legible. '[color=9e005d]takos dinah[/color]'. Takeo's diner.

[color=9e005d][i]Mizu, contact me at Takeo Feuille's restaurant before noon.[/i][/color] No identification necessary. Siward liked to think of purple as his signature colour, but he didn't think the Gabite would recognise that, so he left a lingering scent of fairy's feathers at just the right strength to be dissipated on the breeze by the time noon came around. Either he or the Scyther would surely check soon. A good villain was always two steps ahead of any graffiti-news. At any rate, the mulberry juice would wash off whenever it rained, or if Mizu himself read the message and acknowledged the unspoken criminal protocol to remove all relevant evidence. Until then, he meant to meet this draconic rapscallion and find out what was going on.

The idea that they'd actually meet [i]in[/i] the restaurant was, of course, absurd. Too public by far. But Mizu or his associates would find some way to safely return a message to him somehow while he waited, and, since loitering was for the unemployed or the drunk in his eyes, the Doc showed himself in, leaving his hat on a window seat to mark a reservation and slowly up to the short morning queue to order. A little thin soup, maybe. Siward tended to eat a sizable dessert before each meal, and often nothing else. Hearty establishments like Takeo's weren't his usual haunts, though some of his patients frequented it, telling much bolder stories of their scars than they did to him when they were fresh and needed stitches.

[color=9e005d][i]And, of course, it's as loud as I remember it.[/i][/color] Takeo himself was out and about in the kitchen, exclaiming something insensitive about the smell of a particular customer. The Aromatisse discreetly sampled the air. [color=9e005d][i]Ah, he's not wrong.[/i][/color] Another in-breath. [color=9e005d][i]And that Umbreon isn't what he seems. Ditto, likely.[/i][/color] A Pancham was standing around alongside the Umbreon and an Eevee he had brought in, and Siward wondered. [i][color=9e005d]Maybe a family member too young to be employed last time I was here. Has it been so long? Two years? Hm.[/color][/i]

[@floodtalon][@Ordure][@Bright_Ops]