You arrive at the Castle ward a little early on one of the stallions that pulls your carriage. You didn’t bring the whole carriage in case as you say, the "shit hits the fan". Entering the castle ward, (a big multi-city block area) you cruise in and down to a larger side street, which houses the Administrative building of academia. Pulling up to the third building on the left, you can tell it is the one by a big sign in front. There are posts for tying up your horse, which I imagine you do.

Heading into the three-story building, you immediately enter into a sort of lobby area where a few people sit on some spartan benches, some holding documents, some holding their heads in boredom. More grandly dressed than the most of the rabble, you step forward up to a counter where three people in official government clerks outfits sit, and you tap on the counter, trying to get their attention. They seem annoyingly un-busy, one person re-rolling a scroll up and putting it into a tube, while another carefully pours little ink from a big jar into a smaller one. The third fellow looks up from his finger, the nail nicely chewed, and asks, "And what is your business today, here a the grand hall of academic administrative."

You tell him your name. And that you have an appointment with the Triumvirate, and he OOOOH’S sarcastically and then begins thumbing through a planner of some sort. After a little ‘mmm-mmm-ing’ and whatnot to himself for a bit, he looks up and says, "you’re a bit early. In a few minutes, Doogan will show you to the meeting chamber. Please enjoy a smooth bench seat".

You go and sit down grinning like a guy with some titties in his face. A lady, err, peasant woman, next to you smells rather badly, and the few minutes you end up sitting here seems like an hour... at least! Eventually, Doogan the Dogmatic calls your name and he leads you down a hallway all the while droning about procedures and rules not to be broken in this building. You are too anxious (whether nervous or excited is up to you) about your meeting to pay him any heed, however. He leads up some steps and then into a good-sized room, where a few other individuals are already seated.

As you seat yourself, you take in the others. You see four men, all in government triumvirate robes, sitting quietly, a couple of them scrawling this or that onto scrolls. It looks like they’ve been here a while, perhaps seeing others like yourself. One of them you recognize, no wait, two of them. One is actually one of the Triumvirate, while another is the one you’ve spoken with in the past, the red-haired guy who helped swing a deal for you in years past. You also notice a basset hound in one corner, watching you with intelligent eyes.
The red-headed fellow asks you to sit down, gesturing an empty chair to you. Sitting down, you ask them if it’s cool to open the chest. Another guy you’ve never seen before says dryly, "Thanks to current decree, there is no law against possessing a magic item. Of course, if this item you are about to reveal has negative effects upon people within the vicinity on its own accord, perhaps it would be best if you leave it in your little lead receptacle."

After you take it out so they can see it, you place it on the table, and then paraphrase Tamil’s words of how it worked into better magic school terms for them. After a little discussion between yourself and some Triumvirate younglings, they cast a few detection and probing spells on the mask, and they have a few questions/comments for you:

"If this item is as powerful as you say, why would you desire to give it to us? Are you afraid of power? We would guess that you have no use for it, or very limited use. Another question for you is then, how do you think we would use such an item?

With only a sketchy description of what it does, it will take likely weeks before we can ascertain a proper use for it, and whether that use is truly to our benefit, is at this time, unknown. The fact that our latest magic-allowing-edict <sarcastically said> allowing magic items in the city makes this strange item available for public usage is sad enough, and a year ago, we’d be most happy to take from a do-gooder like yourself, to keep the city clean of magic-bearing miscreants. And likely we’d have even rewarded you. But as the matter is now, in a few weeks it will be likely that magic is allowed throughout the city. We’ll be forced to apprehending heinous criminals after the fact, like a common bounty hunter.
We understand your desire to keep such an item out of peasants and evil-doers hands, but we also can read your eyes, which show an eagerness, an eagerness hoping for something useful in exchange for this beastial goodie. Maybe this mask does have some sort of beneficial effect, one that seems controllable. However, with the state of magic chaos the city is currently in, we cannot offer you much for this mask at this time. If you wanted to leave it with us, we could put a few of our scholars to study and identify some more of the masks’ features, which could lead to more prominent discoveries, perhaps could lead to a ‘better’ exchange, in your eyes at least. But perhaps you would rather hang onto this mask and experiment yourself with it a bit. Perhaps not. Perhaps your ‘good friends’ <perhaps a hint of sarcasm> would like to have their people examine the item. The choice is yours, and we appreciate what you are trying to do, and it’s just we are in a bad situation right now. Would you like the see the log of items shown before us over the last four months? Don’t answer that, I imagine you would, but unfortunately some items do not have significance for us, and this mask appears to be one of them. Of course, our offer to examine it more thoroughly still stands…"

Over the last few minutes as you listened to the chatter, the basset hound has come over and sniffed your feet a bit, nose snuffling up your leg up to around your knee. Eventually he shuffles back to where he was before in the corner, and curls up and closes his eyes. A tough life indeed.

What did Yanni get, if anything, in return for this item? You may never know!