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Show at the luxurious ChapelRefectory. It was now Midday. Her stick she had left behind on a cloak rack at the SecondStage after having narrowly missed rapping a particularly obtuse AVM on the head with it. A cultural historian by profession, Dr'Anya was well aware that variations on the phrase, "I only work here, my lady," had been repeated by all sorts of insensate and jugheaded junior and senior administrators since it came into being on twentieth century Earth, but she was no longer able to view it abstractly with the fate of her own flesh and blood hanging in the balance. Indeed it had driven her of a sudden into a blood-red rage. Much good a walking stick would do her now, in any case, except as a weapon, for her feet-though painful in the extreme-were well able to carry her wherever she chose to go. Then of a sudden Dr'Anya's stomach rumbled. Ah, pray Saint Ida that the good Nell would sense not that rumble over the one hundred or so kilometers betwixt NewOxbridge and the Needlesmith Hold or, assuredly, she would be supping on pasties and greenberry tea, no matter what Stage she happened to have reached by the time Nell arrived, nor at what business she happened to be about! It would, in all t r u t h , have been simpler for Dr'Anya to contact Doctor Grant-Sheblem by simply calling on the transhologram to his home at eventide. But, marry, she willed not to make trouble for the man, inasmuch as she and the good Janni be villains indeed for the nonce. Dr'Igor, mayhap, would requite her discretion. Certes, more disposed he'd be to help her if she wended through conventional channels like any other poor wight. A Doctor he was in faith, she thought to herself, nodding, and genetically averse therefore to administration-most sorely the thorny parts. 35 |