Oh, no doubt it was. And where, pray tell, did that crewmember get it? Piava intends to hunt this source of fruit baskets down.

(She also passes an update on to Sesnai.)

Sesnai's instincts are telling her that someone is trolling her. They're usually quite good instincts, though of course Fate may be interfering, here. "Handwritten." Fruits and flowers are fresh; any symbolic meaning to the arrangement? That would narrow it slightly, since none of her Old Friends cared much about the language of flowers. Ordinary delivery... hmm.

(... Unless they were taken from well after her death. Who knows what Mechanos might learn in the next sixty years?)

(That's not his sense of humor.)

(Well, whose sense of humor is it?)

There's no symbolic reference to it in any flower language from the previous universe, perhaps partly because some of the species are local enough that they don't have Earth equivalents. In the current universe, the message conveyed by the flowers is the same as the overt one: friendly greetings, welcoming, and good wishes.

Piava's trace of the gift basket starts to peter out at the intra-station mailroom, which received it in a standard refrigerated mail crate three hours ago, marked appropriately for delivery to Sesnai but with no sender information provided. It's possible to guess at a handful of directions it might have come from, but the interior of this station is not one hundred percent surveilled and you wouldn't even need to be that good at spotting hidden cameras to successfully haul a disguised gift basket to an unsupervised mail repository without being unambiguously spotted. If she chases down all her potential leads, she will be left with no solid information about who ultimately sent it.

Sounds like Piava needs to make the interior of this station one hundred percent surveilled, doesn't she.

Sesnai's attempts on analysis of the deep meanings of this goddamn fruit basket is interrupted by her psychic senses picking up someone approaching - 

"Gyan's coming."

Nairia busies herself putting away the contents of Sesnai's luggage.

And Sesnai busies herself looking at the fruit basket and browsing the shipnet. When the door opens, she tosses a smile over her shoulder. "Oh, Gyan! Good to see you!"

And Gyantomerenti Adaitan, Sesnai's older brother, senior student at the Royal Academy, sweeps into the room.

His expression is perfectly polished, because the expression of the heir to the throne of Villarosa has to be perfectly polished; his manners are precise, because how could his manners not be precise, and his psychic discipline is perfect, because if it wasn't he might leak misery at people.

"Beloved sister," he says, embracing her. "Welcome to the White Rose fleet!"

And, to Nairia, a polite nod.

Hug! Sesnai does not think of herself as needing hugs, but she's not going to protest.

"Gyanto," she says. "Good to see you."

"Who brought the fruit basket?"

"We've been trying to figure that out."

"Welcome to Villarosa. Huh."

A half-smile. "Well, I can promise it wasn't me."

"I think I guessed that."

"The Admiral will want to see you once you're here."

"Now that I'm here."

"No, I think I said it right."

She grins back. "I'm here now."

And she gives Nairia and Piava polite nods and sweeps off with her brother.

Nairia finishes unpacking and then heads out for preliminary espionage a leisurely stroll around the station.

And Sesnai and her brother proceed throughout the station's corridors! They are, of course, gorgeously painted, because if you're going to build a giant flagship for your fleet and name it after your dead father why would you not also transport painters into space to turn every inch of the halls into artistic masterworks. Technically she is only wearing a cadet's uniform minus the insignia; that would be make her look much less impressive if it wasn't a family tradition to game the rulebook as much as elvenly possible, turning, for instance, a skirt of strictly defined color, length and cut into a magnificent tapestry of war and tragedy executed solely in threads of blue-grey on slightly-different blue-grey. (Humans might miss the details and the meaning with them; her people won't. Adaitan will follow the rules they write, but don't forget who writes them.)

Also, she's crackling with a near-electric aura of power, wears her handcrafted dueling saber at all times, and is visibly sensing all minds by default in a radius larger than the ship. The Tyrant considered, briefly, that being nice served an important instrumental purpose, but not for very long because he really thinks that it works better if people know you have a choice.

(Gyanto is not crackling with a near-electric aura of power. It might be considered rude. He is wearing the clothes his family had made for him, though, since not doing so could also be considered rude.)

(I will not say that this tells you everything you need to know about Gyantomerenti Adaitan, but so far as most people are concerned, it will do for a first approximation.)

And they arrive on the bridge, where, by Ancient Tradition, the Admiral of the Fleet sits in the captain's chair, the captain sits in the vice-captain's chair (which has all the same controls as the captain's chair, in case the captain has a breakdown) and the vice-captain stands behind the captain. Since the Antemecar Adaitan is currently a station, instead of a spaceship, the bridge contains an actual bridge, sixteen feet wide and eight feet tall, detailed with mosaics in gold and shimmering mother-of-pearl, with two command chairs on it (captain's and vice-captain's) like a pair of thrones, looking down on a vast cavern flanking them filled with banks of lights and consoles, most of which serve vitally important military functions in the event that neither the captain nor the vice-captain is psychic, which will literally never happen, or has just had a heart attack, which might, and otherwise are occasionally handy to have people on. The walls and ceilings of the cavern are exploiting the powers of holography to appear as towering natural cliffs under a moonlit night, waterfalls transforming into rains of shimmering starlight as they pass below the consoles.

And Sesnaiilaisa Adaitan advances, escorted (as is tradition, whenever a Royal Kinswoman takes up residence on the ship) by the Chief Cadet of the year above hers, officially only coincidentally her brother, to offer submission to the commander of the fleet, in acknowledgement of the supremacy of military titles over aristocratic. She takes the formal steps forward and bows her head and kneels before her commanding officer, Rear Admiral Duchess Alarante Paizar of the White Rose Fleet, Duchess of the Iron Reach, Victor of Negai Station and Heroine of the Order of the Triple Star. Court gossip has given six different reasons why the Victor of Negai Station is in charge of training instead of commanding one of the battle fleets, and not one of them is true. (Sesnai knows this because she is Adaitan, and because it gave her something to be superior about.)

She is, in an irony that was not at any point intended by any of the people who made the rules, also kneeling before her betrothed, Captain Lord Tefano Eshiaf, Hero of the Day of Death, "Ironwill," "The Scientist of War", Knight of the Order of the Lion, Ferryman in the Passage of Hell and Nextborn. A very impressive list for someone who only played any significant role in one battle.

Well. Better than her zero, at that.

And Her Grace Rear Admiral Duchess Alarante Paizar of the White Rose Fleet bids her rise, and they go through all the formal ritualized exchanges, in which Her Grace bids Her Royal Highness to accept the honors that are her due, and Her Royal Highness insists she desires nothing more than to be a perfectly ordinary cadet of the fleet like any other cadet of the fleet, and Her Grace asks if she's really really sure she doesn't want any special privileges for her being royal, and Her Royal Highness says in extremely ritualized language that defending the kingdom is more important than that, and Her Grace assures Her Royal Highness that it is her honor to have her assistance defending the kingdom, and bids her (and here the gods laugh) submit also to the authority of all officers placed above her, starting with the captain...

And Sesnaiilaisa Adaitan does not grit her teeth because she is the Titanium Tyrant and has better control of herself than that, and assures Her Grace and His Lordship that she will indeed obey all orders in the military chain of command where she recognizes any place above that of cadet she will need to earn herself by her own merits, all according to The Official Script, which is really amazingly ritualized considering it's been used about twice in Villarosan history, and waits for her betrothed to give the response.

Her betrothed smoothly intones the ritual assurances that he will treat her with all the respect that is her due as a cadet of the fleet, which should of course be enough for anybody, and that he appreciates her forbearance in entering the chain of command in this fashion, and that he will take care as he does with all his subordinates to be sure that he never issues her an unjust, unnecessary, or inappropriate order. Someone who was paying very close attention might notice him putting undue emphasis on that last section. Someone who was paying very close attention and knew him very well, a category with very few members and none of them currently in the room, might pick up on how uncomfortable he is with the whole business.

Unfortunately, there's a real shortage of people who know him well in the room! There is someone paying very close attention, though, since this is the first time the Titanium Tyrant has met Tefano, and so Sesnai will continue playing through her Official Boring Speech in which she clarifies that she will obey his orders and asks nothing he is not giving her and will of course never dream that anyone might possibly ever abuse authority in any way shape or form, at which point Her Grace will formally finish acknowledging Her Royal Highness's submission and Her Royal Highness can bow and leave, escorted again by His Royal Highness, who served no particular role in all of this other than introductions, and, just perhaps, being on hand to psychically restrain his sister if she completely flipped out and broke into a rant about the idiocy of the official system, which it is not inconceivable that Sesnai of one week ago would have done.