Emmaline opened an eye with some trepidation. Given the amount of potent dwarven ale she had consumed last night, she expected to find her head splitting and hands shaking. Fortunately it seemed that vigorous exercise had gone a way to muting the effects and though it felt like her head had been packed with cotton balls, she wasn't in any actual pain. She laid a cool hand on her forehead and started slightly to find it tangled with red hair. She had changed it the night before, she remembered. Her eyes skittered towards the case that contained the polished warpstone and found it sitting innocently in the corner where she had left it. Glancing down she found that the snake tattoo was still in place, though it seemed to have slightly changed it pose since it had first settled into her skin.

"Is anyone going to recognize you?" she asked, her tongue feeling tacky against the roof of her mouth. The question had been entirely rhetorical, she didn't want to go through the trouble of changing her hair just to give herself away with a tattoo, but to her shock the snake slithered.

"Hey! Hey!" she yelped. as the ink slithered up her arm. She couldn't feel it, not really, but her body told her she should feel something gliding over her skin. It rolled up over her shoulder and slid down onto her chest, its head coming to rest on the top of her left breast.

"Hey!" she objected again but the snake remained an inert tattoo. She flicked its head with a finger but succeeded only in stinging herself slightly. Neil stirred beside her and let out a mussy groan with which she could sympathize. She climbed out of bed, gathering a blanket around her and went to the window. It was a clear autumn day with a slight chill. In the distance she could see smoke hanging in the air and it took a moment for her mind to tune back into the occasional crash of cannon. The siege was evidently continuing. So far the attacks had been probes, but she suspected that it was going to grow more serious very soon. Afterall, sooner or later the Empire at large was going to wonder why barges weren't arriving from Nuln and the whole force of Reikland was likely to come down on the besiegers. Imperial armies didn't always respond quickly, but Emmaline knew that the strategic importance of Nuln meant that a threat to it was a knife to the belly of the whole nation.

Turning her mind to more pleasant prospects Emmaline tossed some bacon and eggs into a cast iron pan and whistled a spell. Even without fire the bacon began to sizzle on the suddenly hot metal. She poured some of the ground coffee into a filter and snapped her fingers. Streams of water rose from the drinking pitcher, boiling in the air before passing through the filter and sedately settling into the mugs below. She added milk and shredded a little chocolate on the edge of a knife to sweeten hers. The arcane exercise, more spell work than she would normally attempt in a week, made her headache a little worse, but she suspected it wasn't anything some food and coffee wouldn't banish. She flipped the bacon and eggs onto a couple of plates and set the plates on a wooden board that was serving as a tray, then deliberately positioned herself so that she was standing framed by the window, nude except for breakfast on a tray.

"Rise and shine," she called to Neil.