Never in his life had he been more grateful for an uncomfortably diplomatic phrasing; it kept his thoughts from scattering to the winds, fleeing in mortification. “I see. That’s not exactly what I meant by it-”

And it is that moment that the cloud locked away in his hands found the tiniest path to freedom. It leaps from between his fingers, swirling into the night sky like a rocket, carried up with the flickering embers of their campfire.

Dolce watches it rise, until it’s barely a smear against the night sky. He looks to his hands. He looks to the sky. He looks to his hands. He looks to 20022. 

His snout crinkles with the effort to keep from smiling.

“Ah. Excuse me.”

To his great professional credit, 20022 only let a snort escape him.

It…would be rude to ask more, wouldn’t it? After all, you ask a question when you’re not sure of the answer, and you’re not sure of the answer when either possibility could be true. And it’s not that he [i]didn’t[/i] have faith in him. If he could somehow ask while also passing along exactly how he thought the odds broke down either way, he certainly would. But he couldn’t. And it might hurt, after 20022 had already explained so much of his work, hadn’t gotten mad when he’d gently sabotaged the Mayor’s court, who’d walked with him all this way and meant to do so tomorrow. He could all but hear him ask the questions: [i]Did you really think so little of me? What more could I have done to earn your trust? Has all of this meant nothing to you?[/i] No. No, it would be rude to ask more.

It would be rude to imply 20022 shared anything more than his wool with the sheep Dolce had known.

“Your Function, though…” Dolce continues, musing along different routes entirely. “More or less, it’s to aid in administration of the Skies, ensuring that decisions are ultimately made for - how did you put it - the greater glory of the Endless Azure Skies? What does ‘glory’ mean, exactly? You hear the word so often, but it’s not so often somebody stops to tell you what they mean by it. And it’s not like it comes up often in my line of work either. Maybe I’d use it, speaking to myself, when I see a loaf’s come out of the oven just right, when I wasn’t sure how much time it’d need, because I had to make emergency substitutions in the recipe and the oven got switched off partway through.” Yes. Yes that certainly would be a glorious moment, wouldn’t it? “But what does it mean here, to you?”