"Huh!?" Rita's ears twist at that. "What do you mean, they..."

She shakes her head. It probably doesn't matter how they die, exactly.

"...I wonder if that means the residents here don't know about..." she trails off, thinking of how to put it, "...you know, events that might have taken place a long time ago." She means the Serpent's attempted coup. There's no way of really knowing when the events described in the Athenaeum's texts really happened, after all. It's pretty hard to ask without raising suspicion...