Sol dabbed furiously at the spreading juice stain, though it was now obviously a lost cause, as the sanguine tone had spread to cover all of his palm and most of his fingers, and his efforts were only serving to drive the stain further into the fine fabric. His temper was smoldering in the back of his head like a tiger in the high grass, slowly stalking closer and closer, as he forged ahead with futile zeal. So focused on the task, and perhaps partly due to a fifty percent deficit of his field of vision, the one eyed lord did not notice as a brooding hill of a figure approached until said figure deigned to speak in a voice whose low bass intonation was reminiscent of an idling engine.

"You're only crushing the fluid further into the material." It said, in a manner that seemed purposefully crafted to mute any helpful attitude from the statement, so dry a declaration of broad and obvious fact that Sol half ignored it at first. But then the being added "But I'm not sure why you're wearing that glove, it's not like we don't know what's underneath it, Solomon." and at the sound of his name Sol's head snapped to attention with almost spring loaded alacrity, and he stared straight ahead into the night as if he'd just been slapped. 

It was impossible to ascertain from Stanislav's angle on the dark lord's blind side as to what manner of expression he wore at that instant, being that the right side of Sol's face, riven as it was with a single disfiguring scare that yawned out from beneath a leather patch and carefully arranged fringe of dark black hair, seldom bore any expression but one of corpse-like motionlessness. All the same, there was a definite sensation that surrounded him like a foul odor that held similar impressions to a smoldering fuse burning towards some ambiguous terminus. The only hint of what the grizzled young man might be thinking was the bulging of the powerful muscles where his mandible attached to his maxilla, and the very audible creaking of his teeth as they ground together.

That hint could be extrapolated to mean a great deal, but to be specific, what concerned Sol most at that moment was exerting enough self control to not immediately turn and hammer the face of the speaker with such strength as to drive it through the back his skull. Over the course of a few short words, the speaker had managed to insult Sol in two completely, and singularly unforgivable fashions. The impudence of any stranger, civilian or otherwise, to approach him unannounced and refer to him by his given name alone, omitting with either ignorance or deliberate malice, his titles and house, was a capital offense worthy of the highest of scorn, but to, in the same breath, callously point out the true nature of Solomon's right hand was such a stroke of outright hostility that it was a wonder that the one eyed man had the restraint to not immediately fly into a fit of supernatural rage.

Teeth gritted, lest he roar his fury right into the face of the stranger, Sol pivoted his head without the slightest motion from the shoulders down, left hand still frozen mid-dab over his motionless right palm, bringing his countenance to bear with the dreadful grinding inevitability of a turret on the deck of a capital warship. Lips drawn into a tight razor of a line, golden eye blazing with disbelieving outrage, he set his sight upon the intruder with all the severity of a man who had brought death to countless hundreds who had deserved his wrath far less than this horned dunce. The appraisal took all of an instant of his searing gilded gaze and Sol's brow knotted downward in a glare of utter contempt as a serpentine sneer slithered across his face and drew back his lips to reveal clenched twin rows of straight pearly white teeth.

Sol knew this boy, at least by reputation. The horns and braid of grey hair, and as Sol's gaze fell like a bomb downwards to land upon a pair of prosthetic hands, were all he needed to verify the lad's identity. It figured after all, only someone with the pedigree and recognition of the Kovac school would dare to approach Sol with such open disdain, and the youth's heritage only made the source of that ire all the more obvious. The Kovac school had been a competitor for the Celestial Regiment for numerous generations, stretching even past the great war.
Though never approaching the House of Moon in scale or grandeur, the Kovac style of combat had given them an advantage at a more narrow scope of one-on-one combat, and none could doubt the innovative novelty of their armor designs nor the technical prowess of their craftsmen.

However, to Sol at least, the Kovac mentality represented an old way of doing things. Their so-called "Universal" method was preposterously presumptuous, and really just a fancy name for a fighting style that was not really all that different or less narrowly specialized than that of countless other noble houses who fancied themselves to have discovered the "perfect" method of delivering death. And their advanced armor system, which served to provide those without the basic ability to manifest aura a compensatory method of challenging those that could, was a laughably wrong headed ambition. Wars were not won on the minute scale where such a thing as the Kovac armor made a difference, not when technology had progressed to the point that a single volley from one of the forward guns on Sol's personal flagship could wipe out an entire battalion of armored infantry. Wars were fought on a macroscopic scale, where things like economy and political power made much more difference than whether or not what a soldier was wearing when he was killed by an artillery strike was handcrafted by a smith following four hundred years of tradition, or a simple uniform mass produced by the hundreds of thousands in some Atlesian factory. The Kovac school might have the favor of the elite for providing suitable bodyguards and champions, but they would never be able to match the influence of the Moon forces, not as long as they stuck to their archaic notion of warfare.

All that, as instinctive a reaction as blinking was to Sol, from a decade of direct interaction with the industry of private military contracting, surfaced in that back of his mind as he took in the presentation of his unwelcome attendant.

It was true, and not even someone as jaded as Sol could argue in opposition, that there were examples of faunus that were truly beautiful, graceful, and splendidly sensitively developed specimen's in spite of their aberrant mutations. From the first instant of seeing him, Sol could tell that Stanislav was very much not such an example. Sol's immediate reaction towards the boy's appearance, even in a vacuum to his attitude towards the Kovac school and even if the boy had not gone out of his way to present as poor an impression as possible towards Sol, would have been one of disgust. The curved horns, brutishly stout frame, grizzly facial scars and prosthetic appendages, as well as an overall sense of disproportion about his frame, all combined to form an aspect towards which Sol felt an immediate and visceral repulsion, a repulsion that fortified all his worst prejudices towards the faunus as a race.

Sol made absolutely no effort to mask his repugnance, and practically radiated with concentrated loathing for Stanislav's very existence. He did not even feign tolerance, not for a faunus boy, nearly a decade Sol's junior, who had approached him uninvited and proceeded to viciously insult him before so much as an introduction.

"From the look of you, I do not doubt that my attempt to be presentable would be beyond your understanding," Sol said simply, injecting a viper's worth of venom into those words, such that it was a wonder that Kovac did not expire the instant they hit his ears, ", and that's Lord Commander Moon, to you. If you are going to spend your life as some nobleman's lap-dog, you should take the time to master the proper forms of address."

Sol rolled his eye. This sort of chest beating got old in a hurry, and was barely listening by the time Kovac finished his first sentence. There was respect to be had between rivals, but the glittering cyclops was not about to spare any for a man who had gone out of his way to be pointless and irritating from the very start. This was a ritual repeated for Sol to the point that it no longer had any meaning, and he was prepared to simply pretend that the dull brute didn't exist and walk away, but then he began disrobing and the lordling could not help but be intrigued by the turn that this interaction had taken. 

That was until Kovac said enough that the purpose of the gesture became clear and lapsed right back into tedium. Sol was not even prepared to give him the privilege of finishing.

"My name is Stanislav Kovac, and I'm going to see Syn Reznika.." Then Sol raised his voice, rivaling Stanislav's for simple bass intonation and volume, and cut the stupid ox off, talking right over whatever inane drivel was spilling out of his mouth.

"Could you be any more boring?" Sol asked, demanded, as if genuinely interested in what the answer might be as he waved dismissively at the rag in the horned amputee's awful parodies of hands, "Do you honestly think you are the first to swear some vendetta against me? Do you honestly think you'll be the last? Let me make something crystal clear to you. I may be an object of your naive obsession, but to me, you are just another stupid mutt, and I will forget every word you've said by this time tomorrow when some other simpleton swears vengeance upon me."

What a farce. What a joke. Sol disbelieved with the utmost sincerity that Kovac had the faintest idea what he was doing. How could he? He was a child, nearly ten years Sol's junior. Even with the best tutelage that money could buy he was still a novice by comparison. What did Stanislav Kovac know of vengeance, but how to clumsily declare it? What had he ever lost? What had Sol ever taken from him? To make such a claim as a matter of some sort of fanatic or religious duty was patently laughable. 

Sol knew vengeance. He knew what it meant to make such a declaration in earnest, and he knew first hand the toll that it demanded. Sol knew that if he hadn't paid that price already that he would not have let any force on earth deter him, certainly not for an excuse as pitiful as maintaining the veneer of civilization, and certainly not for fear of any consequence. He thought of what he would do if the man who had killed his father were in this room right now, and without hesitation Sol would have cut a trench of bloody ruin through every guest in attendance and butchered that man right there on the banquet table. It was fortunate that man had been mud for nearly ten years now. 

It was Kovac's lack of sincerity, his slavish devotion to anachronism that rankled Sol the most. The fact that the great bull would let something as stupid as neutral earth, or as meaningless as sanctuary deter him was only proof to Sol of his utter lack of conviction. It was as if this were a game, a mummery to the great oaf, as if he did not even grasp the meaning of the words he said. He may have been nearly twice as tall as Sol, but in the gaze of that solitary golden eye, Stanislav was still a boy, no better than a child who had stolen his father's uniform and a wooden sword playing make-believe in front of a mirror. Every idiot believed that he was special, that his cause was righteous, but Sol knew the awful truth. No one was too special to die, and no cause too righteous to fail, and among those unworthy examples, soldiers and warriors were by far the least deserving of success. What a sad, ludicrous, pantomime, a jest, a jape, a grotesque joke.

Sol's father had a saying "Hard words are for fools and cravens. If you mean to kill, you get right to it.". You absolutely did not anounce your intent to kill a man, in a setting where you had made it clear that you would not. It was utterly asinine as far as Sol was concerned.

"You're a coward Kovac. You're all talk and no guts. I wouldn't even wipe my ass with that pitiful rag of yours." The one eyed man sneered, injecting the most loathsome contempt he could muster into the words, forever befouling the space between them with his venom, while managing to seem as if he was looking down upon Stanislav despite being forced to angle his head up to meet the bull's fanatical gaze, "I'm right here you bovine imbecile! Have at me, if you dare. If not, don't waste my fucking time with oaths and superstition, and crawl back to your master like a good pet."

Sol cleared his throat loudly and spat a wad of phlegm at the floor between them. A cool flame had taken to burning in his breast, and a hole into the abyss seemed to have opened in his stomach. He wanted nothing more than an excuse to close the distance between them and hammer Kovac into ground beef, and it was only by the most noble exertion of his own will power that he manged to keep his voice level and features neutral. Sol's father had another saying, "A fool might strike first, but a wise man might watch and learn, and strike last.".

Sol's face was a blank, immobile mask. He was bored of this, bored of Kovac and his cliches, and bored of this entire event which seemed to drag on pointlessly for what seemed like months. He would have liked nothing more than to break every bone in the slovenly imbecile's brutish body, if just to escape the interminable tedium of having to tolerate the dim witted grunt prattling on and on as if he knew anything at all, as if he was saying anything Sol himself hadn't heard a hundred, a thousand times before. It would have been funny, if it weren't so pitifully dull. 

As far as Sol was concerned, Kovac was just words, a whole cloud of hot air with just as much substance, as dangerous and as convincing as a breeze. Sol had his measure now, as an uncultured, inbred swine, a blow hard and an ignorant, naive child, in spite of his imposing stature. The threat that such an unsophisticated subhuman mongrel could pose Sol or his interest was frankly insignificant. As long as he continued to be a craven little mutt, as long as he didn't do anything profoundly and incomprehensibly stupid, such as invading the one eyed lord's personal space, Sol was content to let him bleat until he ran out of air, because at the end of it all, that's all that antagonistic simpletons like Stanislav ever amounted to. If this was the highest standard of champion that the faunus race could furnish, then it was frankly no wonder that they had been occupied the lowest rung of civilization for as long as they had.

Sol rolled his eye, and marched past Kovac, catching the brute's dismissal as he passed by. Sol's face remained motionless, in spite of the sensation of the bottom falling out of his stomach, and his heart suddenly seeming to be pumping steam instead of blood. That is, the living side of his face, the side currently presented in profile towards Kovac, remained motionless, while a flurry of spasmodic twitches crawled up the opposite, the dead, side of his face, across the insensate flesh and around the fissure of puckered grey skin that stretched from brow to jawline. Sol paused for a moment, staring straight ahead into the middle distance as if looking out over an entirely different scene than the packed convention hall, with the a glassy distant emptiness in the blazing gold of his eye.

"I was like you once. I thought I was very clever, very strong. That was before I knew what true strength is. I could teach you, it is a simple lesson." Was his reply, delivered in a flat, empty monotone, with not even a hint of the anger he should have felt at the slight, but instead filled with something darker and less easily defined, "Farewell Kovac, I'll give your regards to your family, when I see them."

And then, as if he'd given a pleasant goodbye fitting of the high society in which they were both ostensibly engaged, Sol departed for a less populated corner of the hall.

Uri watched the tense exchange between soldier and faunus with dreadful fascination from his perch on the edge of the revelries, wondering if the mundane affair was about to get interesting. He'd marked the large faunus and his brief conversations with the other dignitaries, had noted with keen-eyed interest as the bull restrained some darker temper behind formality and manner, and had not looked away from him since he'd first crossed paths with Solomon Moon. Moon, who was of especial interest to Enmerkar, and one of the three people he'd determined to speak with that night, had seemed like he might quite readily attack the bull. That he had not was surprising, for all Uri knew of his venomous hatred for the animal-folk. The confrontation ended without blows however, much to Uri's surprise and, was that disappointment he felt? The old ache in his hip twinged with sympathy, as he shifted himself off the banister upon which he had leaned, almost as though it too had been yearning for some excitement. Uri patted the spot almost fondly. It didn't do much good, the injury was bone deep and a few soft pats could only aggravate it, but he did so anyway. Old habits and rituals were often the least sensible, in his experience, and the hardest to go without.

Taking up his cane in one hand, his drink in the other, Ambassador Ururk 'Uri' Enmerkar entered the fray. He was dressed finely in the stylized uniform of a diplomat, whose cut and appointment only barely suggested at the military service now decades in his past. His chain of office, the sole jewelry he wore, glinted placidly beneath his open collar, the same silvery gold as the cane he tried not to use as he made his way across the crowded hall. He marked Altimeda Fontine out the corner of one eye, the second of the men he meant to speak with before the night was don't, and marked too his proximity to their illustrious hostess, Headmistress Belrose of Beacon. He wondered what the pair might be discussing, and made a small mental note to find out.

"Escaping the bleating?" Uri asked, as he came within earshot of Solomon Moon. His accent was that of the Mistral, but his aspect was that of Atlas, "Or did you come all this way to avoid doing something brash?"
Uri's hip twinged again as he settled into a relaxed, and wholly affected, stance, but he didn't let it show on his face. Rather than lean on his cane, he tapped it pensively beside his foot and showed the young Lord Commander a slight smile.
"The latter, I'm guessing. I commend your restraint." A careful statement, one meant to hint that Uri, had he been in a similar situation as the one Solomon had just escaped, would have had his temper tested too. The sooner he could insinuate their aligned history and purpose, the more easily this exchange would go, or so the ambassador hoped.