Eleanor sipped her own champagne and nodded her head. There were many things she had experienced since joining the Sunday Group that she wished that she could forget. Things that she had seen. Things that she had done. Most of her fears did not dwell in the past however. It wasn't general knowledge, even among the magical community, but something was coming, a conjunction of stars, a nexus in the points of fate that bound the universe together. A knot in the twine out of which Edgar would claim the Nornes spun mens future. The Group, or at least it's myserious leadership, wasn't certain how far in the future the crisis point was but it WAS coming. Even that fear was abstract though, the question that kept her awake at night, was what might SHE do in the future.

"Do you know what I did before I came to the Sunday Group?" Eleanor asked. The question was entirely rhetorical of course, Emmaline alone, now mostly retired to her academic work, had been with the organisation long enough to remember the younger Ellie Tregelan. 

"I was a doctor," she told the young alchemist. Eleanor's face was almost puzzled by that fact, as though she could scarcely credit she had ever been such a thing. Even then she had been a practitioner, though her magic was far more prosaic than it was before Emmaline had come along with her theroms and datasets. 

"I saw my first bodies as a medical student, cadavers in anatomy class," she explained.

"But the things I have seen since," she deliberately put down her wine to avoid from draining the glass in a single swig. There had been far too many bodies, victims, bystanders, friends and team mates, to allow her to shrug it off all together.

"I think it's important never to forget," she said at last, "all of us have a reason to do what we do, but for me, the less people I can put in the bad memory column the better. A good enough reason not to be a trophy wife in the Hamptons like most of my med school classmates anyway." She laughed but it was a brittle and slightly unpleasant sound.

"To the second point... each of us has a unique skill set. You aren't here because we need another...." she paused, considering the words carefully before concluding with "Belligerent."

"Sometimes it is handy to have someone around whose first instinct isn't to open fire or call down spell flame," she explained. A pudgy woman in the aisle beside them started at half heard snippets of that conversation. Eleanor slapped her eyes back to the romance novel in her lap with a glance. Eleanor relaxed slightly and picked up her wine taking another long drink.

"Of course sometimes that is exactly what you need to do, and in those cases it is helpful to have people along who think that is a good idea."

[@Rapid Reader]