Ironbrook – the one place where he would absolutely encounter the necromancers and revived from his mother’s dreadful tales. His mother seemed oddly delighted, as though she had not done her best to convince Mirabile that he would inevitably be murdered and used as a sacrifice for some insane ritual a week into staying there. “Make sure to check up on your sister, too,” was the last thing she said to him before he left, adding more bitterness to the already seemingly endless array of negative emotions that accompanied this particular trip.

And then, in 502 A.E.D., he got a letter. A letter from a person he did not know, a person who called themselves ‘Sha-neth’...informing him that his sister had passed away on a ‘dangerous expedition’. Mirabile later learned that ‘Sha-neth’ had been the name of his sister’s mentor – a fact he would have certainly found out himself had he complied with his mother’s requests and visited her at least once. But he did not. During his two years in Ironbrook, he had not even sent Cantrelle a single letter.

Whenever he was asked about the matter, Mirabile insisted that he felt fine; the reality was, however, that he felt absolutely dreadful. He despised the looks of sympathy he got from the other diplomats, felt nothing short of agitated by their offers to ‘talk about it if he wanted to’. He wished to never think about it again, anything to stop that persistent voice in his head telling him that maybe, just maybe, he could have done something to prevent this, had he not been so envious.

It seemed that ‘annoyed’ was his one and only state of being for months on end, and though he managed to hide his emotions during his work hours entirely, they only came back that much stronger the moment he set foot outside of the embassy. Perhaps that was why, when approached by a slightly intimidating but very talkative Necromancer on one of his walks, Mirabile decided he found him particularly annoying – and back in his school years, the only way to deal with particularly annoying people was to punch them square in the face. And so he did.

It was rather unfortunate, then, that his heroic attempt at defending his personal space had not gone unnoticed. And so, Mirabile soon found himself packing his bags again. At least there would be no more Necromancers or revived in his new destination, right?

Meros proved to be extremely eventful. Not only did Mirabile make friends with one Vissarion Samson Virieux, a revived man equal parts outrageous and oblivious to the diplomat's apprehension, he also learned his supposedly dead sister was actually alive and looking for him. Cantrelle, however, was not the only family member searching for Mirabile, as after a couple failed kidnapping attempts (foiled once by Vissarion and next by Mirabile himself), he happened upon the very cause of his untimely trip to Ironbrook: Skadi, his grandfather, had been looking for family members to utilise for life extensions on a quest to avenge the destruction of his home.

The surprises Meros had in store for Mirabile seemed to be endless, but after no small deal of hardship and doubt, and with the help of what he thought to be the most unlikely of friends, he overcame all obstacles, one after another. Now, he hopes, there might finally be some peace and quiet to be found in Testudo.