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--- plot:mawne:2024-01-27 [2024/03/23 18:51] – Today's stuff pinkgothic
+++ plot:mawne:2024-01-27 [2024/04/06 16:01] – Today's stuff pinkgothic
@@ Line 82: / Line 82: @@
 <color #884400>It took a few moments to guess at what he was meaning. Had she? Adelaide screwed her eyes shut. "It feels inevitable and like I may not have other viable options, but... that's not the same thing, is it?" And his unwillingness to say more spoke very loudly on its own, didn't it?</color>
+"That's not the same thing," he nodded, his tone mild. "I said you can sleep on it, and that's still true. As I said earlier, it would be the easiest way to defuse the situation, by a large margin, but it's your choice - we can try working the kinks out some other way."
+----
+The tea proved soothing, but it didn't fully smooth out her frayed nerves. When Jagdish resurfaced, indeed mildly surprised at their early return, Yarver and her conversation had settled on sleeping over a night. The gym leader's facial expression was considerably less bristly and hard-edged and when he offered a room for the night and Yarver assured her it would be fine, it was only mildly frightening to accept. Maybe one of her pokémon would allow itself to be abused as a plushie and guardian, both - she was not expected to give her pokéballs or belongings to her host. Clearly no one was expecting her to scheme on destroying the place.
+Unsurprisingly, sleep did not come easily, but it did come. Her dreams were messy, incoherent snippets, more emotion than narrative, fragments of unease and a stubborn will to prove herself. All the details bled together. Somewhere in the back of it all seemed to be the unnerving pokémon, observing without making as much as an emulated sound.
+<color #884400>What was she //doing//? The only thing she could. Which was... trying not to break down, apparently, or chalk the entire thing up to a series of vivid dreams. Nightmares? Nothing terribly nightmarish had happened. Yet. Unless one counted murderous conspiracies, in which case things perhaps had, but nothing enough to count as evidence, and how did one handle a conspiracy when it involved the very people you were report such things to?</color>
+<color #884400>Adelaide's thoughts had chased themselves in that spiral many times over the night.</color>
+<color #884400>The looming sense of //presence// had not helped. Was there a Legendary pokemon spying on her dreams, or was her mind considerably more rattled than expected by their brief encounter yesterday? Adelaide found herself regretful she'd never looked properly into the myths and stories of Sehto. The best she had was a surface, tourist-friendly skim, which gave her the answer of... maybe.</color>
+<color #884400>Maybe wasn't good enough. But surety of any sort was in short supply.</color>
+<color #884400>In fact, the only clearly defined path was 'submit to trial and pray for a good outcome', but a craving for certainty was //not// a good reason to do something dramatic.</color>
+<color #884400>(She wondered what counted as a good reason. Did anything?)</color>
+Technically she had been told how to navigate not only to the bathroom, should she need it, but out of the building, but the architecture of the place seemed maximally confusing - and so it was good, at least in one singular sense, when there was a knock on her door, and, absent any protesting sounds from her, Jagdish appeared in the doorway.
+Somehow, he seemed less scary that the evening before, despite all of the dreams. He was lanky, dressed in casual clothing, black hair presently slightly slick with the moisture from a morning shower. Evidently he didn't blow-dry his hair. That trivia was sure to be important on some final exam somewhere.
+"Good morning," he said, politely. It wasn't obviously a false sentiment, either - the acerbic undercurrent from their first meeting seemed to have mercifully evaporated. "Can I bribe you with breakfast?" One corner of his mouth played at a smile, combining with the absurdity of the question into obvious humour. The breakfast, presumably, was real.
+<color #884400>Breakfast? Breakfasts were good. Breakfasts made sense. It was very hard for a breakfast not to make sense, and she was including those strange northern 'we buried a fish and forgot about it' breakfast foods in that number.</color>
+<color #884400>"Breakfast sounds lovely," was what Adelaide said aloud, because odd diversions on how to ruin a perfectly nice fish was not appropriate small talk around one's possible employer/jailer/lawyer.</color>
+"Great. Evil plans work much better when all involvees are on the same page," Jagdish said, in the same perfectly conversational tone of before. He took another look at her, but she was quite presentable, so he gestured with one arm for her to follow, and began to lead the way. "You might get exposed to more of my dark sense of humour over the course of breakfast." He didn't apologise for it, technically, but the warning felt like it was for her benefit, at least. "Speaking of which, forgive me the curiosity, what //is// dream-me's body count?"
 **✘ IN PROGRESS**
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