Searing 52, 122 Age of Steel
The von Osten estate in the Reichtum was an immense, sprawling affair, more reminiscent of a country villa than a city house. It was evidently true that all that Zaichaer did, the Imperium did in a grander fashion, on a vaster scale - or at least, so it seemed from Anton's perspective. His grandparents' home had so many rooms and buildings that the staff and retainers he had brought with him from the High City hadn't just been housed, they had effectively vanished inside of the recesses of the complex.
He had lived in the main manor for less than a month, and each day he discovered some new chamber or corridor that he swore wasn't there the last time he had passed that way. It was, after all, an old house, and Anton knew how the bones of such places did not concern themselves with what blueprints and diagrams written in a dusty archive. There was always something that passed through the cracks, something that even the current inhabitants didn't know about, the last to use it having died with the secret.
Which was all to say, it made perfect sense that Anton refused to go into the library, the sitting room, the tea room, the living room, the den, ir the solarium - or indeed most any other room aside from his bedroom, the dining room, and the foyer - without a servant or family member to guide him. After all, even his own mother, who had grown up in the building, had managed to get since her return to her childhood home.
It was the latter of his three 'safe' rooms that Anton was currently lounging in, the lord finding it more convenient for his sense of direction to keep himself as close as possible to the front door. He, of course, reacted to this relative safety by completely overloading his arcane perception by reading a book at the same time as he listened to news on the Hub. His fascination with the magitek information system probably had something to do with the fact that even he got lost in the house.
Probably.
Still, it's not like he had much better to do. Vanessa had gone off to do her typical recreations days ago, and unfortunately for Anton the Imperium had a 'mass media' that influenced 'public opinion' and it could make things more difficult for his grandfather in 'Parliament' if news of any untoward behavior got out, so joining her was not an option. He had already attended to all of the business in the city he could at the moment, and it was now just a matter of waiting. So he did what he did best and busied himself learning as much as he could about his motherland.
