Dilandau was screaming hysterically and fighting the restraining belts that held him to the operation table. He was calling the names of his dead soldiers and clawing at the table where his hands were held down. He didn't register anything around him. He just kept screaming.

'He's going to injure himself,' Paruchi commented. 'I'll sedate him for the trip back to the capitol.'

'Wise,' Kuaru nodded, a look of morbid fascination molding his features.

Dilandau screamed louder when the needle pierced his skin but then quickly began to quiet and still once more, his eyelids drifting shut and his body going slack.

Formua picked up Dilandau's coat from the counter it had been cast to while he was being strapped down and fished in the pockets. 'Pack-rat,' he grinned, pulling out a handful of random trash. 'Pen, paper, a glass bead, a feather, a napkin -no- half a biscuit, a comb, a handkerchief and two paperclips. He just picks up random crap, doesn't he?' Formua chuckled. 'But, then, you can never have enough paper clips,' he picked up the clips.

'It's all just rubbish,' Paruchi scoffed, sweeping the pile into his hand and taking it to the garbage. He held onto the feather, pushing it up his sleeve as he turned around. 'He'll be under for twelve hours. Post a guard. I'm going to get some rest.'

'I think I will as well,' Garufo yawned lightly and left the room behind him. Paruchi waited until he was alone in his temporary lodgings abroad the transport to pull the feather out of his sleeve and give it a closer look.

Dilandau never went outside. Not when he wasn't on mission. He wouldn't pick up something so frivolous while he was on duty. Where would he get a feather? Why would he carry it around with him? Though he did seem to be a pack-rat as Kuaru said, most of the other things in his pockets had seemed to have some use. This did not.

He pushed his glasses further up his nose and looked at it more closely. It was perfect. There wasn't a wisp out of place. Everything else in Dilandau's pockets had been bent and rumpled, as one might expect. This was not.

He bent it between his fingers experimentally and let go. It sprung back into place with no sign of having been damaged. His interest perked and he crumpled it into his fist, crushing it thoroughly, then opened his hand and stared at it in fascination. It still looked as though it had only just been dropped.

In Paruchi's experience, feather's were fairly fragile things, but a small bell was ringing somewhere in the back of his mind. He dropped the feather on his desk and dived to the box of his books pushed into a corner for the trip.

Sifting through the books, he tried desperately to remember where the diagram he was looking for lay. A pile of discarded books steadily grew next to him as he flipped wildly through pages, focussed and excited as he searched.

His eyes caught just a glimpse of carefully drawn feathers as he flipped through a book bound in black leather. He scrambled to his feet and hurried back to the desk, finding the page and laying the real feather on the opposite.

One feather drawn on the page was an eagle's feather, the other a Draconian's. Notes along side told him defining features of Draconian feathers that did not appear in birds'. Paruchi went down the list, mentally checking off each characteristic.

A giddy, astonished excitement grew in Paruchi as he scanned the pictures and words on the page. It all fit perfectly. It had to be a Draconian feather. Where on Gaea had Dilandau acquired a Draconian feather?

Paruchi gazed down at the feather sitting on his open book for a long time, his mind irritatingly blank, and then, very slowly a grin pulled at his lips and he chuckled softly, closing his eyes. 'You always were very strange, Folken.'