I'll show you something good!

"And I bet we can get Carnelian and Chalcedony to team up to play Master Addam! They seem like the chivalrous type, don't you think?"

Minoth nodded, charitable as anything, and let Haze on with it. She'd been eagerly and earnestly planning out a dream casting for plays about their adventures with the Aegis(es), should Minoth ever get space and funding to build sets and a stage, for the better part of an hour now - gratuitous time had, of course, been afforded to extra recountings of Lora's past adventures, as well as all the ways in which Haze herself had succeeded Jin once she'd arrived. Again, he let her on with it.

"Ooh! And what about for Lady Flora?" Haze rubbed her chin, lips adorably pursed. "Do you think Marena? Or maybe Sarah!"

Ah, the fair ladies of Auresco... Not bad choices, all in all. Marena had been an older classmate of Flora's in secondary school, and remained a distant friend to this day, while Sarah had the slightly more lively complexion and accompanying personality Minoth found most appropriate - not that Flora was, in her own words, silly (she was), but that if there was to be a direction strayed in accentuating key personality traits, to make them most accessible to a passingly invested audience, the meticulousness, the uprightness, the...mom-ness could be stowed in favor of that certain spark the art dealer had.

Well, no. Maybe that was true, and maybe it wasn't, but moreover, you couldn't reduce Flora into either of those aspects. You had to have someone who was both silly and strict, both kind and keen, both hale and heartened.

And she had to be very, very cute. This was, maybe, most important of all. But as Minoth still found himself not entirely at ease to expose all of his personal history and predilections to the traveling group, he wouldn't dare say so.

He would try, though.

With a stroke of his own chin, he began to cast out a response. "Well, those are some pretty good picks, but you have to understand what, or rather who, we're dealing with, here. She's a sweet lady, and she knows it, but she's not full of herself. She's always well-dressed, but she's not a prude and she's also not not a prude. She was a teacher before she married Addam, and she was the kids' favorite - but that's not because she's some people-pleaser! Many's the time she's raised her voice at people with poor enough manners to make their low opinions of him known."

(Those people in question were Flora's own mother, and only her, and Minoth had never been present to witness the event(s), but he could extrapolate; of all people, he was certainly allowed. It was even necessary, sometimes.)

As he'd gone on, and on, and on, Minoth had earned Haze's most serious, wisdom-consuming gaze, as well as something markedly less grave from Addam off somewhere behind her, and so he'd also earned himself a false sense of security about the supposed detachedness of his information.

Finally, she came out with it: "Master Minoth, how do you know so much about Master Addam's wife?"

Well. She hadn't said "why", so that was a blessing, anyway. Appearance-based stereotyping'd give that someone like Haze should, or at least could, be expected to yield as much; in other words, she had no right to be making Minoth as nervous as she was, and he felt like an absolute clown for it.

Don't sweat. Literally, don't sweat; it'll make your jaunty little bang sag.

So how to cover? Don't say too little. Don't say too much.

"Eh, I like to be in the business of knowing things," Minoth replied with a demure wave of his hand, back of wrist facing skyward. "Besides, we're...old friends."

The pause was, of course, highly intentional. As they say, such descriptions as that would always be highly available to cover a myriad of sins. And Haze bought it.

"You and Lady Origo? Oh, that sounds wonderful - would you tell me about it?" (Up went the perennial eager fists of girlish enthusiasm.) "Please?"

...cover again.

Minoth shifted from his usual position of chin propped on hand stemming from elbow propped on thigh to a defensive crossing of arms. "Ah, no," his voice threatened to crack, "me and Addam. Right?"

Haze bobbed up somehow higher in response.

"Oh, right! I'm still waiting on your stories about that, too, you know. I mean, you can't just have so many adventures like that and not tell!"

Mm-hmm.

"Adventures, huh?"

Minoth shot Addam a look. The prince miraculously manifested the ability to whistle, and the Flesh Eater began to regret joining in so late, if he had to have joined in at all. To the party, that is - as concerned this conversation, he didn't have the wherewithal to actually set about considering the other possibilities. It proceeded as unwritten history that nobody cared about. Not exactly his favorite way to fly.

"Tell you when you're older, how's that?"

"I'm a Blade, Master Minoth," Haze reminded him coyly. Where her chin led, a quiet, elegant triumphance followed. If he wasn't currently in such a stew about his own inability to...handle emotional something-something-something anywhere outside of the frame of a fiction, he might have room to be proud.

But not so. "I won't be getting any older. So you'd might as well tell me right now!"

Tell her what, exactly? The lake incident in Uraya? The many, many times Addam had told Amalthus off entirely by accident? The way Minoth himself had almost tripped over Flora's crouched back when they'd first met?

Oh, Architect, say it wasn't so...

"I'll think about it. Consider it, you know. A playwright can't just write his responses-" (all willy-nilly, Haze would say, and maybe Flora too) "-off the cuff, you know!"

Minoth stood, turning away and breaking into a run after he'd cursorily excused himself, and for all he cared they could think he'd gone to soak his head in a stream. Way too philosophical an encounter for something that had started out so innocently. Nothing for it: Blades were born existentialists, no matter how you sliced them.

"You know, Master Minoth was very interested in who we might cast for your part in his plays about all our adventures. If it were me he paid that much attention to, I think I'd be flattered!"

Crossing her arms, Flora tilted a knowing head and knowinger brow back in Minoth's direction. "Flattered, huh? And only that?"

He could be disappointed (halfway to straight pissed, even) that she didn't stroll over and loop her arm into his to lay the whole thing out flat, or he could be flustered to the point of withering at her coy act.

(In the back of his mind, he compared notes and touched up his character assessment. Mark: prone to smug outbursts, if the time for wittiness is right.)

Indeed, he could. Or, he could fence back, and walk back his prior statements completely.

He waved the wrist-hinged hand in the air again.

"Wasn't about who we'd cast, Haze, so much as whether or not we'd cast her at all. You know, the wife of the hero really is sort of a background part, in the grand scheme of things. After all, where were you when Malos attacked Auresco, Lady Origo?"

"Oh? I don't seem to recall...and tell me, where were you when Addam returned to Aletta, Maestro Minoth?"

"Out philandering, of course." She knew, of course, that his way of getting by on mercenary work had very little to do with philandering, and even less to do with fraternization, euphemistic or not.

"And who could you possibly cast to play such an inimitable one as yourself? It's not everyone who can fight with those knives of yours - and I'm sure you want realism! Artistic realism, but realism nonetheless."

"Might you be volunteering yourself, my dear lady?"

Haze coughed, loudly.

"I'm confused."

Minoth turned to her, hand not-so-innocently creeping over to the small of Flora's back, with the holsters on his hips oh-so-conveniently blocking any view to the erstwhile gap between their bodies. Flora, of course, moved in kind.

"Shoot." (Flora rolled her eyes, gently, at this.)

Cocking her head to the side and setting the bangles on her tiara asway, Haze offered her suggestion: "Why don't we just get Lady Flora to play herself? If no one knows what she looks like. And if no one else would be right." This last came accompanied with a suspicious glance flicked into Minoth's eyes and just as quickly hidden away.

Brilliant, wasn't it? Minoth grinned full out now, and hugged Flora to him by his hand now snuck all the way to the other side of her waist. If Haze was watching there now...well, what else was there for it?

"Couldn't have said it any better myself. Could you, Flora?"

"I wouldn't dream of trying to top you, you silly, silly man."