Before Ryan could so much as flatten the crease on the ink-stained parchment, the magistrate pivoted sharply away from his courier and stepped back into Ryan's personal space, fixing him with an intense, unsparing glare. The official slammed a heavy wooden tally stick against a nearby crate, loudly demanding an immediate accounting for the missing grain shipments from the southern provinces. To the magistrate, the deficit in the local storehouses was a treasonous catastrophe; to Ryan, standing in his pressed white collar and charcoal trousers amid the fluttering paper lanterns, it sounded distressingly like the disastrous inventory shortfalls from the Mascot warehouse audits that had been plaguing his department all week.
Ryan offered a low, exhausted sigh, shifting the weight of his canvas messenger bag over his shoulder with the practiced calm of an events coordinator facing an impossible venue deadline. With the same placid patience he usually reserved for frantic vendors screaming about delayed beverage palettes, he raised a hand to pause the magistrate's flow of accusations, mentally translating the archaic harvest figures into the familiar, suffocating framework of a corporate budget deficit.
"If you're looking for the reconciliation logs," Ryan murmured in a quiet, tired tone, half-tempted to pull out his plastic ballpoint pen and draw up a red-ink correction grid, "you'll find that the third-quarter allocations were already flagged for re-routing over at the regional hub. I'm merely trying to sort out the paperwork so I can catch the next connection back to the station before my lunch break officially expires."