Compared to the manor, the Witches preferred the ship's cabins with their Fifth Epoch interior style. In truth, the Witches liked any culture or popular style from the Fifth Epoch. They had always longed for that age when Witches ruled the world.
Because the Teleportation Gate aboard the ship was located in the enormous banquet hall within the cabins, the hall, furnished with five long tables, had become the main gathering place for the Witches and their Followers.
The banquet hall was actually two stories tall. Staircases on either side of the doors led to the upper floor. The upper level was merely a corridor running around the walls; during banquets, people holding wineglasses could look down into the hall below from there, or enter the rooms on the other side of the corridor to rest.
When Shade appeared in the ship's cabins, the busy young ladies were gathered around the tables, either leafing through Miss Belinder's documents on the Seven Great Families or handling tedious paperwork for their respective mistresses.
Miss Matilda and Tifa had been waiting for Shade. They had led the work of reviewing and summarizing the three sets of materials.
The five of them sat down at the end of a long table. Tifa was the first to inform Shade of Military Intelligence Section Six's investigation results:
"There were simply too many suspicious accounts mentioned in the original report. We conducted another round of screening based on transaction frequency and how well they matched the dates you provided. There are now two suspicious accounts remaining."
Two clipped files were handed to Shade. A black-and-white photograph was additionally pinned to the top of the first page of each file, showing what the account holders looked like:
"Neither holder is an ordinary civilian. The first is the local