Chapter Text
Merel Roosje walked through the dimmed rooms with her hands clasped behind her back. "Museum Hands" her professor once called them, to signal to the docents/guards that one wasn't liable to reach out and touch works of art.
Merel was in the sprawling Novigrad Museum of Art. As a young museum professional, she had been to the museum about a hundred times and cherished each visit as if it had been her first. She currently worked as an underling at the well known Vivaldi auction house in Hierarch Square, hoping to amass connections enough to climb the ladder and eventually snag a job for herself restoring artwork. Thing is, it's one of those jobs where you have to wait for someone to die because people rarely retire, and even rarer still for new positions to appear.
She had taken to purchasing inexpensive paintings and sculptures at the marketplace near her employer when she could, so that she could deconstruct and examine the materials.
Unfortunately, most of the materials were becoming mass produced and the lovely variations were few and far between. In the olden days, the very best paints were handmade by artisans and stored in chort bladders. Since chorts were thought to be functionally extinct, that practice died out and now paints are produced and sold in metal tubes.
And Merel needed to go to greater lengths in order to find pigments to study.
Merel had always had a creative side. Her parents gently nudged her towards a more… lucrative profession, such as interior design or fashion design. However, despite their best attempts, she stubbornly stuck with her Museum Studies program, eventually earning her degree– with honors of course.
While her classmates chose specialties such as Aen Sidhe Elven Architecture, Zerrikanian Weaponry, or Kaedweni portraiture, Merel was mostly interested in the composition of the materials used. For instance, she took a course which taught her how to determine the forest of origin of the wooden boards used for paintings, and could determine within a 10 year gap when the tree was felled based solely on the size of the rings and wood grain.
Merel learned the techniques necessary to reproduce the pigments,ground,glue, and varnish used in old paintings. Sometimes she mused about becoming an art forger. She was already halfway there.
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She bought a museum membership right after she graduated college. Although it was a significant chunk of money for the newly grad, Merel didn’t see it as anything other than absolutely necessary. Merel went to the museum at least once a week so she got her money's worth. She considered it her home away from home, her extended living room of sorts. When she didn’t want to be in her small living quarters anymore, the Viziman woman would grab her bag and perhaps a sketchbook, and head to the museum.
She was at the museum so often that some of the security guards would recognize her and make polite small talk when they saw her.
“Hey Merel! What’s on the agenda for today?” asked an enthusiastic youngish looking human male.
“Hi Travis!” Merel replied as she strode through the lobby, “oh, not much, probably going to hang out in the Viziman Room today.”
The guard nodded. “That Liedtke you like was sent out on loan to that museum in Beauclair.”
“Thanks for the heads up. Have a good one.”
Merel walked up the large peach-colored marble central staircase and headed left to the Viziman room when she reached the second landing. The high ceilings of the pale green room gave way to a muted skylight and a few spotlights. It was often crowded with tourists and hurried school groups from the rich upper crust families during the weekends. Today it was sparsely inhabited, save for a bored looking Dwarven security guard and a smattering of people passing through to the other galleries. In the middle of the room was a plush bench with a low back for gallery visitors to sit and take in the works.
Merel took up the end of the bench and plopped her bag next to her, rummaging around in the -seemingly bottomless- leather chasm for her notebook. Her shoulder length brown hair kept getting in her face while she was looking, so she hastily threw it up in a messy bun to control it. She finally excavated a blue leather notebook and a handsome ballpoint pen. She flipped through the pages of text until she landed on the one she was looking for.
- Vizima, 1230-1240.
Inside she had well organized notes of the compositions of various works in the gallery, a tiny sketch next to each one, and the various materials used in the construction of the work.
She looked up at the space where the Liedtke once hung, with a tiny “OUT ON LOAN” sign in its stead, and carefully made a note of the date she visited and the missing work.
---
Merel walked up the stairs of her old, slightly run-down apartment building and unlocked the door to her apartment. It wasn’t much, a cluttered and cramped, albeit sunny 2-bedroom that she shared.
“Hey Mer! How was work?” asked Shani, Merel’s cheerful red-haired roommate and friend, from the dining room table surrounded by medical tomes. They went to Oxenfurt together and met through some shared general classes. Shani was a fledgling medical professional and worked at the local hospital as part of her residency.
“Hey Shani. Same old same old. Some rich snobs come in to flaunt their wealth while treating you like the dirt beneath their shoes.”
Merel bent over to take off her sensible ballet flats before going any further into the apartment and placed them on the combined shoe rack. The living room and dining room directly ahead when you walked into the apartment, followed by a small kitchen in the back right corner opening onto the open floor plan. Books on bookcases and plants were the main source of decoration for an otherwise supremely beige space. A small striped tabby cat was curled up on the dark colored couch. To the left of the main room was a short hallway with the bedrooms and the bathroom.The cat lifted his head when Merel opened the front door and nonchalantly went back to his nap. “I can’t wait to find a better job,” the dark haired woman said as crossed the room to the kitchen.
Shani nodded. “That sounds rough. Have you heard anything from the applications you sent out? You could always come to work in the hospital. We’re looking for a new art therapist.”
“Crickets. Not a thing from the gallery or the museum. Gods, unless I start from the bottom up it’s so hard to find a job in the art world, I might as well wipe my ass with my degree for how useful it's been.” Merel opened the fridge and stared for a moment until she found what she was looking for: a nice Redanian stout. She turned to Shani and twisted the cap off using her shirt tail as leverage.“Want one?”
“No thanks, beer was never my thing.”
“Suit yourself.” Merel threw her head back and took a swig, then leaned against the plain Formica counter. “You know,” she stated slyly, “I go to the museum all the time. I’ve become friendly with some of the guards. How hard do you think it would be if I did some...independent research?”
“What are you implying, exactly?” Shani said with a frown.
“It’s just that... well, I think I could get away with taking some samples.”
“Don't. You. Dare. That is a disastrous plan Merel Regina! Don’t tell me anymore, I don’t want to become an accomplice in your hypothetical crimes!”
“Okay mom, I wasn’t actually going to do it. I was just thinking out loud. I check the marketplace on the weekends and good estate pieces are getting harder to come by. I can practically identify Cintran umber in my sleep.”
Shani exhaled, “Look, I can’t in good conscience condone that you do that. I know you really, really want to be an art conservator, but maybe there are other platforms for you to explore. Have you thought about doing an internship? Maybe getting cozy with the conservation/restoration department? I’m sure you could flirt your way in, you're young and cute.”
The dark-haired woman pursed her lips at the suggestion. “I don’t think flirting my way in is going to work, despite how charming I am. The conservation department is like, the super exclusive department. You basically have to wait for someone to die for there to be an opening.” She took another long draught of her beer and shifted her attention to the easel in her living room, a simple still life of grapes and melons decorated the canvas which had a few noticeable patches of lighter color. It was one of her secondhand finds she was doing some research on. Next to the easel was an opened journal with swatch tests. Nothing too wild. Temerian yellow, Cintran umber, alizarin crimson and a few other unremarkable pigments. Merel would do almost anything to be able to immerse herself in research with pigments on a permanent basis.
She turned her attention back to Shani, who was scribbling a note in her book.
“Anyways, how’s the hospital?”
Shani’s face brightened as she grinned wide, “Oh it was a fun one, today I got to assist with an amputation!”
“Oh gross, that’s morbid.”
“It is not that gross! I’m making a difference in people’s lives everyday.”
“I do admire that about you, you’re never one to shy away from that stuff. You’ll make a great doctor someday, Shani.”
“Thanks Mer. You’ll find your niche, I believe in you. To change the subject,” Shani said while she rose from her chair, “how about a few episodes of Keeping Up with the Kaedwenis?”
Merel gave a small smile. “You read my mind.”
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It was evening.
The museum was open later on Saturday nights.
The only people in this wing (200 year old domestic still-lives created for well-to-do aristocrats) were Merel and a bored looking security guard.
Merel surveilled the room carefully. She had done some stake out/surveillance trips in the following weeks to see what the foot traffic would be like and how observant the guards seemed to be (spoiler alert: they weren't). She wore a pair of soft leather ballet flats to muffle her movements.
It did not appear that she would be caught. Most other museum visitors were in the lower gallery where a retrospective on Van Rogh's paintings were displayed.
She observed that the security camera is pointed across the room at a more interesting/well known painting. It performed a sweep of the room every 3 minutes or so. Merel would have to work swiftly to collect and jar the specimens with being noticed.
The painting before her was a tidy composition of figs, lemons, and some variety of melon that looked rather exotic, which meant very expensive at that time period. She imagined the kind of wealth one must have had to purchase an exotic fruit and commission an oil painter to immortalize it. The colors were vibrant, varied, and exactly what she was looking for.
She slowly pulled out a small folding knife and bag with compartments out of her overcoat pocket and lifted it to the frame-
"Fascinating painting, is it not?"