The quest chain sat unopened in the corner of Rama's vision for three days before he let himself look at it properly.
Not fear, exactly. Caution — the specific discipline of a man who'd learned, across seven years of institutional crisis, that unexamined notifications rarely improved with delay, but examining them too quickly, before there was room to actually respond to whatever they revealed, tended to make things worse rather than better. Three days gave him nothing except distance. He took it anyway.
Tonight wasn't for the quest chain. Tonight was for something Sekar had been circling for a week, waiting for their daughter to fall asleep before finally saying it outright.
"We need the story finished," she said, once the small breathing across the room had gone slow and even. "Not the pieces we've been improvising. The whole thing, consistent, something we could both repeat the same way if someone asked us separately."
