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“I still think I should be the one to Turn the boy,” Pulcinella says pompously, arms folded as he twirls the end of his moustache, looking far too comfortable in a leather armchair twice his size. Capitano, while he can't quite glare, casts Pulcinella a glance that radiates irritation.
“The boy is violent and hungry for battle,” Capitano offers, his voice a low rumble in the air. He shifts to sit a little further away from Rosalyne, who's staring into the flames of the fireplace like she could burn down the entire palace with nothing but her gaze. “Surely my guidance would be preferred, lest he lose himself to bloodthirst and become another scourge on the Fatui name?”
“Why does anyone need to Turn him?” Scaramouche says harshly, leaning against the wall despite the empty armchair offered to him thrice, now. “The Tsaritsa is a sire and a coven head. She can handle the turning of one boy, even if he is marked by the Abyss. Nobody else was there for my Turning, were they?”
“Because you didn't have a Turning,” Dottore drawls, looking like he'd rather be anywhere but there, clipboard in hand and one eye turned to the watch on his wrist. “You were damaged goods when you arrived in Snezhnaya, Scaramouche. You didn't have a Turning , so much as you had an entire operation .”
Scaramouche opens his mouth as if to offer a scathing remark, presumably about Dottore's lack of a stable bond with the others, but Rosalyne cuts in before he can get a word in edgeways.
“I remain the obvious choice,” she says easily, turning her attention to Pierro - their Director stands off to the side, looking nothing but unimpressed at their bickering. His one visible eye is cold with hatred, but fondness prickles at the edges of the bond anyway. “I'm not exactly a paragon of virtue, of course , but I'm a far better decision than some of these fools.”
“I'd like to take myself out of the equation entirely,” Pantalone says serenely, half of his attention on the meeting and the other half on his ‘business’ conversation with Columbina, which is certainly just gossip - not that anyone's particularly interested in contesting the word of the Second. She murmurs something in Pantalone’s ear, and he laughs elegantly. “And so would our dear Columbina. We both have far too much to do to busy ourselves with the care of a little fledgling. Not even Peruere was that young when she became a Harbinger.”
“I wasn't aware we could choose to not be involved,” Dottore says absently, and casts Pierro a scathing glare. “Not that I'll even be allowed to see the boy for the first few weeks, will I?”
Pierro does nothing but keep his gaze fixed on Dottore, until he huffs out a petulant sigh and returns to his watch, fidgeting with a few of the dials in some sort of attempt to look busy.
“I have work to do,” Sandrone says, as careless and cold as she always is. She, out of all of them, has always appeared the most uninterested in all their meetings. Her gaze is fixed somewhere in the distance, eyes glazed over and body still in the arms of her mech. “I, too, have no time for a disobedient fledgling.”
“He's a pleasant boy,” Arlecchino corrects, curt and cold, crossing her legs at the knee as she leans back in the seat, eyes roving back and forth over her fellow Harbingers. “Troubled, yes, but we all were when we entered into her Majesty’s arrangement. I do not think we should be making judgements too early - but I do not wish to be this boy's sire, either.”
“Pulcinella remains the obvious choice,” Scaramouche drawls, unperturbed by Rosalyne’s attempt to again insert herself into the conversation. “The man is practically Childe’s father figure already. Why not throw him into there and be done with it?”
“Again, Scaramouche, you do seem so keen to show off your ignorance at every possible turning,” Dottore says, adjusting his mask to hide the glint in his crimson eyes. “Pun very much intended.”
Scaramouche draws himself up, as if preparing for a fight - but catches Pierro's icy gaze at the last moment, and settles himself back against the wall, lips curved into a scowl.
“What Dottore means is that fledglings will take traits from their sire,” Arlecchino explains, careful and controlled like she's speaking to one of her more ignorant children. “Or, in the case of the Tsaritsa’s coven, whichever sire is more present. Whoever is chosen to be Childe’s sire will influence the boy’s demeanour and personality, ergo, the choice must be one taken with the utmost care. I do believe our current options are between Capitano, Pulcinella, and.. Rosalyne.”
Not a single Harbinger misses the glance the two women send each other, and Dottore gags theatrically in the corner until Pantalone reaches over to swat him on the back of his head. Columbina's eyes brighten behind her blindfold, clearly overcome with one of her ideas .
“We should vote a hat,” she says proudly, like she's come up with something as revolutionary as indoor heating. The silence here is significantly more awkward, until Rosalyne seems to somehow catch the meaning.
“Ah! She's suggesting we all write our votes on little slips of paper, and then whichever one has the most votes is chosen,” she announces. Columbina, now satisfied, promptly slumps against Pantalone’s side, prepared to nap through the rest of the meeting.
“Didn't Arlecchino just say that we have to do it with the utmost care ?” Scaramouche says disbelievingly. “What part of picking names out of hats is careful ? We should just ask the Tsaritsa who she thinks is best, instead of engaging in all of this-”
“I support Columbina's idea,” Pantalone offers, and the room ripples with murmurs of agreement. Scaramouche, for his part, looks as though he's considering the most convenient way to tear each of his coworkers limb from limb.
Pulcinella plucks his hat from his head, and fishes out a few pens and some paper before beginning to pass it around the room. Sandrone denies the offer with a haughty sniff that's mirrored by her mech’s indignant grinding of its gears, and Dottore takes far too much pride in scribbling a phallus on his paper instead of anything actually productive.
The hat is passed back to Pierro, who seats himself at a desk to count the votes, looking as though he's reconsidering his career choices. The room remains silent in the conversations exchanged between the Harbingers, performed only through furtive glances and tics.
A penis? says the quirk of Pantalone’s brow, and the curve of Dottore's smirk is an exceedingly clear of course .
Voter fraud , is passed in a glance from Arlecchino to Rosalyne, the both of them suspicious of the innocent mayor sitting across from them.
A flick of Capitano’s helm is an obvious behave yourself to Scaramouche’s seething glare, which means nothing more than these two better get a room .
After far too much silent conversation, Pierro returns to his place at the head of the room, brow furrowed as he glares down at a sheet of paper.
“One vote for Capitano,” he says calmly, then runs his thumb down the page to the next row. “Two for Rosalyne. And nineteen for Pulcinella.”
It is said that Rosalyne’s shriek was heard all across Snezhnaya, and was enough to cause the two guards outside to have near-instantaneous heart-attacks.
Nevertheless - despite Rosalyne’s complaints and Scaramouche’s annoyance - it was, in the end, Pulcinella who accompanied Pierro and the Tsaritsa to the Turning of their newest fledging, and it was him who stayed despite all that happened in the events that followed.