[b]Eli:[/b]

Pope nods absently, he’s focusing on his story now. “I’ll be taking that as a direct quote, name withheld of course. Trouble is going to be finding a pseudonym for you that sounds like more of a placeholder than ‘Red’ is anyway. The Dragon, maybe?” He nods. “I’ll post that on the socials now, to get ahead of it. Make sure that’s what people agree to call you, before the doxx comes in.” 

Eli climbs a brown bear’s shoulders to find you over the top of the crowd, then drops down and runs over to you. He’s read, panting and he’s got a black eye, but he looks proud as hell. “Hey! Lost you for a minute there, you should have seen-” He stops, looks at Pope, grins. “Hey, my absolute dude.” 

Pope looks up from his story and his big bulging eyes widen in terror, suddenly. “Numb. Always, always a pleasure. I should really get on this, uh, thank you for everything. The Costa-Silva piece goes up tomorrow morning. You’ll like it.” 

Then he’s making any excuse to walk nonchalantly away from Eli, and Eli grins after him. “We didn’t like, there’s no drama between us,” he explains to Red, “he just really hates it when people know he’s got a type.”

You’ve got to wonder, Red, how much Pope identified with the stuff you just said about the Governer you just unmasked. 

[b]Panther:[/b]

The panther considers the situation, the overheating, the [i]way [/i]Spearmint claims ‘my event’. Spearmint is still aware enough to recognize the way the panther’s attention disappears from the front of her eyes and turns back inwards, that someone’s started concentrating when they look at you but they’re not completely looking at you. She’s working out how to steer you through this situation - like a nurse realizing the patient is delirious, like a highschool teacher realizing something about a student they’re not supposed to see, like a scam artist realizing their mark is already caught on a worse hook, like the bartender realizing the woman he’s been serving to has been roofied and is trying to figure out a safe place to get her before someone comes to collect. 

“Call me Chaka.” Pronounced Shah-kah. “I’m not hijacking anything, I’m letting you in on it, it’s you and me together now, right? We’re just going to move this, and you can go through it while we do, and you tell me what you don’t like.” Her tail cracks like a whip to punctuate it. “Here, I’ll walk you through it. Walk with me.” It’s not a question. 

She flicks a single claw out to steer Spearmint with, to trace the parts of her back she’s venting from so she doesn’t burn herself touching her - especially because touching Spearmint just seems to get her hotter. She aims Spearmint back at the bathroom again. “Now. Be a lamb and pick one up. You’re stronger than you look, aren’t you? Then we just take it back to the bedroom-”

The bed has been flipped up against the wall to give more space in the room. Electrical tape has been laid out to mark planned inventory space around the room with a central walkway through it. In the middle of the taped bit of plush carpet is a label maker which makes packing-tape wide stickers with a little Blackberry style keyboard input on the handle.

“You’re going to open it up, look at what’s in there, and you make a label for it, and find the part of the floor it belongs. If you don’t know what something is, I’ll tell you.” She stops steering Spearmint with the claw and walks around her, tracing the side of her neck as she goes, drawing a line up and down from Spearmint’s throat to her heart and back again when she crouches in front of her so they’re eye to eye again. Again, those legs make it so her crouch doesn’t slow her down, it just makes her ready to pounce. “Isn’t it better to keep an eye on me? You just throw me out, I’m just going to end up somewhere you can’t find me again. Stick close, though, you see for sure I’m not making too much trouble for anyone.” 

Threaded through those words is something Spearmint might not be capable of understanding, but an outside observer would hear pretty clearly; [i]‘Please stay where I can keep an eye on you, and stop you from getting yourself hurt. Please do this simple, repetitive task to keep yourself from doing anything worse.’[/i]

As far as Spearmint’s flirting goes, it’s actually got something going for it. Right now she obviously feels genuinely responsible and protective of you - her natural domme is coming out and she’s trying to take control from Spearmint. An unkind view of what she’s doing has her taking control from Spearmint like you’d take a gun from a five year old while trying not to freak them out about it, but if that was the whole story then why is Chaka still trusting Spearmint with all the actual weapons here? 

“Look,” she pulls out a phone and holds it up to Spearmint’s face, shows her a calendar with anonymized names on it for later tonight, and wipes it. Her phone buzzes as it sends a text to each of them. “I canceled my appointments for the rest of the night. Call it a show of good faith. Now we can take as long as we need with this, because nobody’s going to be coming to bother us.”

If Black were here, she’d say she’s just doing it because she’s scared she’s been made and she’s limiting her exposure and now she’s just flipping the gesture to impress Green with it. If Orange were here she’d be trying to work out what she could learn from looking at the rest of the calendar, discern any of the people behind the pseudonyms, recognize the wealth of social knowledge here. 

What nobody is going to tell her is that if she sees you as fragile or vulnerable, she’s not going to react to the brat routine with claws and chewing. She’s trying to de-escalate you, right? That doesn’t mean Spearmint has to do what Chaka’s actually asking, here. It just means Spearmint’s got an easier path getting soft-dommed if she goes along with this until she proves she’s of sound mind, and the harder path lies in threading a needle; proving she’s sane enough to be a risk while provoking and resisting [i]without[/i] contextualizing herself as a genuine, real danger to Chaka by doing it. 

Not to gild the lily too much here, but you’re locked in a hotel room with a black market arms dealer who literally transformed herself into the image a jungle predator, who is deeply aware that half of all murders go unsolved and not getting caught gets easier with practice. Violence is close to a last resort to her, but that is a sincere risk of trying to bait the hard path or attempting to blackmail her. [i]Blackmail will really not work here.[/i] There’s a path through the minefield, just mind the mines. 

On the other paw, the softer route lets you go through the cases one by one, scope each other out better, and gives you a staging ground to show you’re sane first - you can always pivot back to the other path from there. At the very worst case scenario? It makes the shower usable. 

[b]Pink:[/b]

Crystal takes the first, boring bowl and takes a bite of it with a spoon. She appraises the one made ‘creatively’. 

“Why don’t you tell me about that one.” Her eyes flick from Pink to the second bowl as she debates saying something, but she decides on saying it. “That one’s just poison, I’m afraid. What’s curious to me is I’m sure you know that about [i]‘Sink’em![/i]’, and obviously you don’t want to hurt me.” Still, she thinks, it’s better to remind Pink she knows that. “Please, correct me if I’m wrong about any of what I’m about to say, I just want to make sure I understand: You can cook masterfully if you do it without thought, but it requires a sort of rote learning to do. If you actually try to cook, it turns out somewhat lethal. The obvious conclusion is that you were taught to cook for Mrs. Everest and you wanted to kill her.”

Here she cocks her head at Pink. “What I don’t understand is why you’d repress that? If I might be so blunt; the bitch had it coming.”