After a long talk with her mother, Fiona managed to get permission to see the opening of Hotel Zafiro. It is not like she's exactly on her own when she gets there, and she's old enough to sit in a hover and travel by herself. What's the worst that can happen? Nobody would dare kidnap the youngest cousin of House Dellevon!

When Fiona arrived at the Hotel, she hopped down from the dark black hover, and skipped down the promenade into (showing her ring to security) the blue building. Nobody was waiting for her -- although they promised! -- so she went a-looking for some family.

Fiona nodded at Jouji when her cousin said that they had made new friends. She got the impression that she was being treated with kid-gloves. But, aware as she was that she had fainted at the reality of Cobreo's demise, Fiona understood that they were justified in keeping it simple. She wasn't nearly as adult as she liked to think.

Diego mentioned that they should go back to the party, when all of a sudden she heard a splash in the adjacent room, from which she had just arrived. With an involuntary thought, she recognized that someone had appeared... from where? She generally had a good situational awareness -- her mother, Marisa, had insisted that she be trained in psychic matters until it was as natural as breathing -- but in this case, a new mind had just popped out of nowhere. Had they been hiding their consciousness, or had they manifested out of nothing?

She would have looked to Diego for answers, but it looked like he was receiving a phone call.

Some of the party went back to the jacuzzi room. Fiona stayed by Jouji and her cousin, trusting their maturity in deciding the safest course of action. Would they go to the adjacent room, or back to the party?

Fiona awoke a couple minutes later, her mind having undergone a hard reset. She looked around the blue room: an end table, clock, dresser, dinner table, television, and so forth, all stylized in a retro-futuristic indigo. She lay on the smaller half of a queen-sized bed. She remembered going up an elevator, and talking to Diego and a weasel named Joe, but nothing else. She didn't remember falling asleep.

Her skin and clothes were sticky. She vaguely processed that it looked like blood. Was she injured? It didn't seem so.

Something must have had happened. But there was a hole in her memory, and a quiet part of her brain wouldn't let her focus on it. Fiona's mind didn't want to remember.

She tucked herself in, and tried to get comfortable. Maybe all she needed was sleep.

After rolling around for a few minutes, Fiona pulled herself out of bed and went to the washroom. In the mirror, she saw streaks of blood on her face and shirt. She cleaned herself up as best she could, inspecting to make sure she wasn't injured. No, this was definitely somebody else's blood.

Why was she alone?

She reached out, tentatively, with her mind. Panic fear assaulted her emotions. Fiona was safe here, she thought, but people out there were scared. Somebody must know what's going on. Heck, she felt like she knew the source of the mass anxiety, but it was locked up in a partition in her brain. The letter "C" struggled to find something to connect to.

She saw a portrait open like a door, and through the door was a passage to the adjoining room, where Diego and Jouji's entourage were waiting.

Fiona entered the room, saw Diego, and suddenly someone stepped on her grave. An icy hand touched Fiona's neck, and she felt ill. She was immediately on guard.

At that moment, she realized the implication of her black clothing. She was in mourning. But she couldn't quite remember who... or did she? Not Diego, clearly. And then it hit her like a frozen asteroid: Cobreo. That's who was missing from her mind. He was supposed to be here... but nothing met her psychic probes. She didn't have any tears left; they had all been shed in blissful ignorance. Her body had adapted to this new state of being before her mind did. All she wanted was... for someone to be caught. You can't get away with murdering Cobreo. There's no safe place for someone who does that.

Her face was a tearless mask; her psychic guards were up. And with every remaining shiver of energy, she went into detective mode. "What have we learned?"

Diego barely needed to touch Fiona to pry her off the body; she melted in his arms. She was still sobbing, and still with the the damnable Aschen music playing on her handheld.

The guards covered the body of Cobreo with a sheet, and that was the end of that. "No, no, no," she repeated. This wasn't at all like when she saw a dead lizard or bird on the sidewalk. When that happened, the first thing she did was take out her camera. But using her camera here would have been... unholy. She knew that someone somewhen would be taking pictures of this scene. Let them carry the curse.

There was a stickiness on her skin and clothes. She didn't process it. She couldn't keep her thoughts together. The world started to lurch out of order. And Fiona fainted in Diego's embrace.