The magistrate’s face twisted into an expression of profound, administrative panic, his ink-stained fingers bunching the fabric of Ryan's canvas messenger bag as he hissed accusations of imperial sedition. To the local official, the heavy, unindexed foreign ledger stowed within—bound in strange synthetic cloth and filled with suspicious alphanumeric distribution codes—looked less like a business document and more like a treasonous blueprint designed to destabilize the entire regional supply chain. The surrounding guards bristled, resting their hands on the hilts of their swords with the grim finality of an IT security team arriving to permanently revoke a compromised employee's access badge.
Ryan let out a soft, flat sigh, the kind he usually reserved for a regional director discovering a phantom line item on an end-of-quarter budget sheet. With the exhausted diplomacy of a marketing coordinator trying to talk down an overzealous compliance officer, he gently prised the official's trembling fingers away from his bag strap. "It’s not sedition," Ryan explained in a calm, matter-of-fact tone, adjusting his jacket as if standing before an unyielding photocopier rather than an armed tribunal. "It’s just an auxiliary inventory ledger for the Mascot transit route. If there’s a discrepancy in the allocation hashes, I’m more than happy to file an amended variance report, but confiscating it won't fix the underlying deficit."
Unmoved by corporate analogies regarding balancing sheets, the frantic magistrate demanded an immediate, public confession before the district's auditing seal could be permanently locked against Ryan's employee profile. Ryan simply kept his hand securely pressed against the flap of his bag, offering a placid, non-committal nod while mentally calculating how many minutes he had left before he missed his next hypothetical connection out of the district.