Erika rolls her eyes.

This single moment of perfect, wordless acting might be enough to buy her doubt. Might be enough to sow the seeds of confusion as to whether or not she really is the person she says she is, or if she's Eclair Espoir after all. The tiny huff and the annoyed scoff are so very Mayzie, and so very not maid-knight, but above all so smooth and natural that she can see it register on an intellectual level. Good. That is well. She finishes by twirling the end of one of her pigtails in a display of aggrieved haughtiness.

"[i]Maid-Knights[/i]," she spits, "I was only asking you a question! I've never been here before! How did you turn that into a referendum on whether or not I have a right to be here?"

Her notebook flips open and she plucks a pretty crystal pen from her things before she starts to scribble. Erika Fullbright does not take notes in the style of Eclair Espoir. It will cause the latter no end of consternation later during review, but the needs of the client come after the needs of the job. Rather than color coded speculations and notes, Erika mostly doodles. In this case she has recreated a shuffling deck of cards to the best of her ability, rendering Timtam's hands in the act of manipulating them. She makes a pair of tally columns just above it, marks one with a big X and the other with an O, and draws a line in the O column.

There is at minimum no more room to doubt that this is the woman herself. Card games were Timtam's signature escalation within the Manor and the Great Game, and while she might have played on that via a proxy, [i]nobody[/i] could make a deck dance across the table the way that she does. She has such finite control she can alter the fate of every player with nothing but her fingertips even while using a fresh and unfamiliar pack of cards. This is how she strung up her opponents in the manor, luring them in with runs of "good luck" and sloppy play before miraculously betting big or playing aggressive (depending on the sort of game) and without mercy taking everything her opponent had on her (and sometimes also the opponent).

There have been attempts among the more creative members of the Manor to create card games, in particular strategy card games with simulated monster or heroine battles to combat her skill by making the game of choice complex enough that Timtam simply didn't understand it on a level that she could affect the outcome so certainly, but that edge only ever held up as long as it took her to find some obnoxious combination which she would mysteriously trigger a turn before losing every single time. In the arena of games of chance in general and card games specifically, Timtam was an unparalleled warrior. Nearly untouchable. It made sense that she would choose this as the means to accept the challenge Eclair had laid down for her.

But even still.

Erika plucks up the teapot herself and rather inelegantly pours a pair of cups. She sniffs at her own and adds five sugar cubes, and then sits there, staring and stirring with equal intensity.

"I'll play. Obviously. Wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't. But see normally in my line of work the way this goes is I just ask you questions and then you either answer them or find a way to refuse me without giving away what you think. That's the game of it, if there is one in the first place. Liar's Hand? Never heard of it. So since I'm early, how about you use those soft and precious lips for something useful and fill me in on the rules while we wait for the table to fill out? I promise you I'm a quick study."