[Social] Not a Date, You're my Boss

[Lisette Allaire]

Lisette finds the place easily enough - the modern internet being what it is. London is full of impressive, upmarket establishments. As she gets deeper into the higher-market areas, she can scarcely walk ten seconds without hitting a place that would empty her purse in a night. The Booking Office is one of the most well-to-do looking establishments, not the kind of place normal people go to talk shop. Not the kind of place anyone goes to, normally, except for a big celebration. Lisette wonders about Ashlie's personal wealth, and the level of mortification she must have felt - did she really find Heather's lashing out so awful that this was the kind of place she treated Lisette to as a gesture, or does she simply not experience financial problems like the rest of humanity?

She doesn't think too deeply into it. At the entrance, she gives the name Minamida, and is shown to a table. Ashlie wasn't kidding - she really can get things on a short notice. Lisette looks at the drinks menu for a while; everything starts at ridiculous and gets worse. So, for a moment, she just takes in the decor, feels the chairs which are nice enough to be upmarket without being anywhere near comfortable enough to linger in forever. There must be scientists in labs who are paid to create chairs that are 'comfortable', but not truly a pleasure to sit in. She leans back against the plush velvet and closes her eyes, appreciating the first moment she's had to just sit and do nothing in about eighteen hours.

Actually, fuck it. She'll order a drink, and if Ashlie doesn't cover her tab she'll pay for her one drink and find her way back to the Arches. She orders something cheap and white - and by 'cheap', they mean £12 for a large glass - and sips it, wrinkling her nose a little on the first sip before she realises that actually, even the 'cheap' Muscat around here is pretty drinkable. She lets the alcohol soak into her system, and lets the weariness season it. Alcohol always has a way of taking the edge off - Lisette doubts she's alone in that.

[Ashlie Minamida]

She doesn't have to wait very long for Ashlie who has swapped out her suit for one that's marginally more casual but helped by the fact that the suit jacket is slung over her shoulder in favor of the simple vest she's wearing underneath. Spotting Lisette she gives her a slight wave and makes her way over. "Hope you didn't have to wait too long." she says, knowing full well it's 7:59 at the time she sits down in the chair opposite Lisette. "Never actually having been to a bar I might have erred a bit too far on the side of avoiding a dive." she says with a glance around, not so much nervous about the cost but the impression of inviting Lisette to this much of an up-scale place. There's a fine line between apology for what happened and bribery to overlook an incident and frankly, Ashlie has little idea where it is.

For all her sharp choices in fashion, she looks very much like a fish out of water and knowing what Lisette does now it's very likely that aside from never having tasted a drink, Ashlie has never been on a date in her life, business or otherwise. "I'll be honest, I half expected you to have changed your mind after today." she says before waving down someone to ask for another glass and the rest of the bottle of whatever Lisette is having. "But I'm quite glad you didn't."

[Lisette Allaire]

Lisette's eyes snap open at the sound of Ashlie's synthetic, newsreader voice. She doesn't move her head from its tilted-back position against the booth seat she's sat in, though she does bring her glass up to her red lips and take a deep sip. She has no problem with the taste of alcohol, though she wonders how Ashlie will handle it having never tasted it or suffered from its effects - which could be anything for a being that may or may not even have a liver. Lisette reflects briefly on the way that humans treat their produce and their livestock so carefully, forcing the cleanest and most productive products of the earth to the table so that the humans themselves can destroy their bodies. It's an idle thought, and she sets it aside easily. Maybe a talking point for later, if Ashlie is a pessimistic drunk.

Lisette has had time to make herself over, and is wearing a fitting but not tight dress, draped elegantly over her slender form, in dark green velvet with a ribbon that ties from the low, low back in a bow around the back of her bare, pale throat. It's one of her favorite pieces of understatedly slutty clothing, and she's wearing it a lot more for her own benefit than Ashlie's - she hasn't had an occasion to dress truly upmarket for years, living on a student's income in hiding at a university. Ashlie, for her own part, looks absolutely beautiful in an understated suit, like something out of an exploitation crime flick, which would irritate Lisette if she were in a pettier mood, considering how much effort she put into her own makeup.

"I've been here about five minutes," she said, and examined her glass. Half-empty. Lisette would have to drink a little slower than that. "I half-expected it myself, actually. But, well, I was thinking about it and I think there's no real hiding, nowadays. I can't live a life worth living and also be completely undetectable to people like... well, anyway. It was a surprise, running into a West, but I can't live my life in fear like that. If your institution is still standing after direct confrontation with that bitch, I think I'm safer than anywhere else here." Lisette has not nearly enough information to draw that conclusion, but the truth is that she couldn't stand the embarrassment of asking X-Corp to relocate her again after the ink is already dry on her new life, not on her very first day.

"This wine is pretty sweet for a low-alcohol white," she explains, "but you might not want to start with a white, anyway. I'd probably start you on a cocktail, actually, a fruity one. But give it a shot. Would you like a taste before you commit to a bottle?" Lisette holds the glass out to Ashlie, a red lipstick stain glistening wetly on the far side of the glass. "I'd take a small sip. It's not like grape juice. Sweet, but not as you'd understand it. You need to have tolerance for the bitter, too, and the burn." She does her best to keep any condescension out of her voice - she's trying to be helpful, but her voice is a little flat, a little dry, and instructions delivered plainly can sound like judgement coming from her at times. Still, she offers the glass.

[Ashlie Minamida]

Ashlie eyes the half-empty glass and quirks an eyebrow in amusement. "Five minutes? Are you sure we won't need the bottle regardless?" she laughs and takes the glass from Lisette to take a careful sip. She lets it sit in her mouth for a moment, then swallows it down. "Mmm, I see what you mean. It's a little acrid. Not all that bitter though. Better cushioned by the grapes than coffee at laest." she says and hands the glass back. "I'll give it a chance." she says and settles on the bottle after all, but orders a French Toast Cocktail. Which is much too specific for her to not have looked up some options beforehand. What a nerd.

The glass she hands back to Lisette has the audacity to not even leave anything but a faint imprint of her lips behind. No lipstick, no make-up at all aside from just a bit of eyeshadow. It truly is unfair to get away with that and still have such a smooth complexion. Sure, it's at least partially synthetic but it's not like Ashlie looks botox-and-facelift artificial. And someone who sleeps 4 hours should at least have the decency to require some concealer under her eyes to look like this. Meanwhile Ashlie naturally does not notice any immediate effects of the alcohol. The nanites in her blood are unaffected and while the organic parts of her liver still recognize the toxin and set to work, much of it spreads through her system undetected and unhindered. Blood vessels under the regulation of her nanite nervous system don't dilate much, cellular pathways activate but only provide minimum signaling until the alcohol reaches her brain. Here the distinction between flesh and machine is still stark enough that the system begins to take notice but the response in combating the 'neurotoxin' is slow.

By that time the bottle as well as her cocktail have arrived and she's made it through a glass of wine and takes a first sip of the smooth and sweet mixture, nodding in approval. "You were right about the cocktails, I think I much prefer this even if it's quite heavy." she says and let's out a sudden laugh that differs wildly from her normal amused tone. She actually raises her hand to her mouth as if she'd just burped. "I apologize, it seems I was not entirely in control of that. Is a certain floatiness normal? I anticipated some impairment but my thoughts feel perfectly clear. They're just embedded in a very comfortable cloud." she chuckles. She never chuckles. Occasionally she makes sub-vocal noises of amusement but this was bordering on snickering. "I bet these brainwave patterns would be quite amusing. I believe only part of me is feeling the effects." Language center? Working perfectly. Motor functions? Surprisingly decent. Proprioception? In no danger of incidental movements of accidents from misplaced appendages. Emotional stability? Slowly melting into mush.

A number of impulses that normally bounce off of her or never got much traction on their own seem to be picking up speed. Like the fact that Lisette chose a dress with a plunging back no longer just registers as a signal of a certain level of casualness. She hadn't read much more than that into it but it is certainly registering now and her eyebrows inadvertently rise just a little bit. "I like your dress, by the way." she perfectly enunciates, though she normally absolutely would not have done so. It'd almost be preferable if her words didn't come out perfectly fine to give her a chance to step in before they just come out, but apparently impulse is perfectly capable of taking over the unaffected systems of her brain. Lovely.

[Lisette Allaire]

Lisette lets out a little snort. "When I first tried wine, I thought it tasted like vinegar. I shuddered so hard I almost bent double, like I sucked on a lemon. And coffee tasted like dirt. In a way, it still does, but you learn to pick up an appreciation for when the barista's made an effort, when it's, you know, smoother than pica." At Ashlie's order, she raises a single eyebrow and quirks a one-sided smile. "What the fuck is a 'French Toast'?"

The conversation moves on, and Lisette finds herself perpetually amazed by Ashlie's outlook. She finds out that Ashlie has been in a physical body for a very short time - in fact, has been cognisant for a very short time, relatively speaking. Only a few years. Most of her maturity stems from an early life spent running at a clock speed of a couple hundred billion cycles a second, developing, self-reflecting, iterating on herself at a speed a human simply could not do, something that Ashlie assures her is impressive if one is a very different kind of nerd to Lisette. Lisette, for her part, simply allows herself to be convinced that yes, it is legal for Ashlie to be drinking here, and yes, Ashlie is essentially an adult. She comes off as a bit older than Lisette, actually; just kind of a shut-in.

Lisette is good at detecting the shifting moods when alcohol is involved. Very specifically, she's good at telling how other people are feeling, and viewing her. She sees the alcohol hit Ashlie's system a scarce few minutes after Ashlie is aware of it, sees her relax a little, watches her perfect posture dissolve into the normal slightly slumped posture of an average person. Still, she's fucking perfect. It's the kind of casual, professional envy that Lisette takes from a much older career, one revolving around being the prettiest girl in the room and leveraging that for professional advantage. If someone in the room was hotter, Lisette needed to find a place under herself to put that person. She shakes off that instinct - this is her boss, not a person she wants to be in the habit of undermining, and the impulse is misplaced for the situation anyway. Lisette is good at keeping her impulses under control while drunk. Better than when sober, actually, because she's far more deliberately careful.

Lisette lets her eyes wander over Ashlie with casual interest while she's enjoying new experiences, finding mild novelty in watching a fully-grown adult sample and experience all these new things. She's used to the concept of alcohol being old and tired, just the same social lubricant, so it's funny watching Ashlie feel her faculties dim, her senses dull, and finally her inhibitions melt away. "Yes," Lisette assures her, "floatiness is normal. You lose a little bit of coordination, a lot of your inhibitions, then it all spirals down as the evening goes on. There's a reason people tend to serve alcohol at important dinners - it gets everyone talking. They call it 'social lubricant' for a reason." Ashlie's laugh is improper, uncontrolled, and would have been unattractive if she was anything less than physically perfect. Instead, it's just endearing, like everything else about her, if one can look past the mechanical neatness of her mannerisms.

"Brainwave patterns?! You nerd!" Lisette laughs freely and easily. "Maybe it's possible that you would handle walking the line better than a normal, human drunk. It'd be funny to watch you try, actually." She sees Ashlie's impulses shift again, and is suddenly aware that Ashlie is trying, as casually as possible, to pay very close attention to Lisette's bare shoulders, the curve of her throat, the gentle swell of her chest under the elegant cling of the dress. It's like watching a teenager - surely Ashlie has a fully-developed aesthetic sense, or everything she said and did would be a lot less perfect, but now she seems to actually feel the human impulses attached to that aesthetic sense. Lisette, for not the first time, has the feeling of being desired. But somehow, it doesn't quite translate into an uncomfortable leer.

"Thank you," she says, in a genuinely responsive tone. "I got it in a boutique in Prague. You look pretty immaculate, too." I'm not going to fuck my brand-new boss. Even though I probably could. But she could have some fun here, mess with Ashlie's head in a cute, harmless way that can be politely written off the morning after, from separate bedrooms.

Lisette rests her chin on a couple of fingers, looking Ashlie very closely in the eyes, intense but not searching - just taking in the view. "You practiced that compliment in your head before you said it, didn't you?" another easy laugh - we're all friends here. "I find that after a little while, it's less about finding it easier to do things and more about finding it harder to stop. I've ended up in more strange matchups than I remember. It's fun. It's actually pretty easy to tell how people end up as alcoholics." Lisette leaves the meaning of the phrase 'matchup' vague. Arguably, she herself was a functional alcoholic - she could definitely do a three-martini lunch and carry on the work day afterwards. "You don't seem like that, though. I think this would most likely just be a fun little way to get you to cut loose. Which, by the way, I am going to get you to do. You have to freak out and fuck up on the way to being a normal, well-adjusted person." She works a perfect nail over the ribbon tied around her throat. In a way, it feels like drawing a bow across the strings of a violin - Ashlie being the violin in question. "You must really feel sorry, taking me to a place like this. This is the kind of place people takes dates." She quirks a little expression of mock-distrust. "You'd tell me in advance if you were taking me on a date, wouldn't you?" A gentle push, harmless really, into the informal. Any... inappropriate actions or impulses Ashlie takes from it are her own thing.

[Ashlie Minamida]

Telling Lisette about herself is uniquely enjoyable. Sure, she's talked about much of this before with other people, but they had known her well before hand. Lisette doesn't and there's a fascination there that Ashlie hasn't felt for a long time. And she's well aware of her working out Ashlie's equivalent age rather than what is printed in her official documents. She'd write it off as Lisette simply being genuinely interested in the unique lifeform she's encountered but the floaty thoughts at the periphery of her mind are coming up with other implications. She's checking if it's safe to flirt and Ashlie gets her first taste of proper, biologically-driven mix of excitement and nervousness. She'd shown Lisette her workshop at least a little bit to impress and now she's showing Ashlie her playground.

"I practice everything in my head before I say it." she laughs as a bit of emphasis and inflections are creeping into the normally very flat and proper voice. "That probably sounds horrifically tedious to biological ears, doesn't it?" Well, might as well lean into the flow of it and rely on the fact that she's bloody smart to keep her from proper embarrassing herself. Somewhere a sub-routine notes that while none of her functions are affected, the content very much is beginning to. "Maybe it is, but I've never known any different and I suspect that part of me is too integral to ever change. I self-monitor. Supposedly it's part of what makes me sentient rather than just a very clever imitation but who can really tell." If the forming of her words was affected she would definitely be rambling. As it is she sounds a little more like giving a lecture, albeit a very personal one. "The first words I ever heard were 'A process aware of it's own existence is called a consciousness'." she recites.

"Probably the reason for my fashion sense as well. Can't be too self-conscious if everything is neat and clean and you don't have to navigate the intricacies of fashion and color-coordination or incidental messaging." she says though she's beginning to think very little about Lisette's dress and the way she draws attention to how it clings to her are very incidental at all. Ashlie is suddenly quite glad that she can't really blush. But hiding behind implications and 'plausible deniability' she can do. She's done it for most of her life when saying one thing and meaning another was her only way of expressing herself.

"And ah, of course this isn't a date, Miss Allaire. That would be incredibly inappropriate, as much as you do have me at a disadvantage here." she smiles with just the hint of something else tugging at one corner of her lips. It turns out the gynoid knows how to flirt. "I like to think as an apology it's less extravagant and more definitive. I do feel bad about what happened and you can tease me for wanting to make it up to you but that's not going to stop me." she says, propping her chin up on her palm, elbow on the table and just a hint of smugness in her eyes like she's daring Lisette to challenge her.

[Lisette Allaire]

Lisette's face breaks out in a wide grin. Here's a language she speaks - the language of small, meaningless flirting, even if it appears about two layers of subtext down to be a verbal sparring match, and contains moments of genuine connection that make the whole exchange a little too real. It prickles her, spices the pleasant loosening of the alcohol and allows her to sharpen herself towards a goal that isn't just survival; insofar as partying can be a goal.

"Self-monitor? That sounds serious. So are you recording this now?" Lisette takes a sip of the wine, then reaches over and takes a sip of Ashlie's cocktail, making eye contact as she does. She wrinkles her nose a little - espresso in alcohol was never her thing. And was that... butterscotch? Toffee? Something like it. "Ugh, dessert cocktails. And I was going to look so smooth stealing your drink. This ruins my whole plan." She shrugs a little. "I hope you're getting some good angles anyway. I think you could rock velvet - though I'd say blue is more your colour than green. We're sort of opposites, aesthetically, aren't we? I'm more the French Toast, you're more the white wine?"

Lisette checks her phone for a moment, frowns, puts it down on the table. Just a coded check-in from her handler - they do them when they're concerned something might have happened, which is often. Usually, it means nothing. Or at least, all but one time so far it's meant nothing. That one time, though, she relocated from Canada to the Netherlands that same night, with nothing but the clothes on her back.

"Sorry. So we were getting to your definitive apology. I'm definitely not stopping you from buying me drinks, though perhaps next time you should go a little more student haunt than upper-class date spot. Not that I'm complaining - this wine is delicious. But just how much money do you have? I'm used to high-tier corporate executives and financial heirs walking in and buying the whole bottle - which was eighty pounds, by the way - but you're a university dean. What kind of salary do they have you on, Ashlie?" She wasn't driving at that point from the beginning of her sentence, but it occurs to her, and intrigues her, mid-musing. Alcohol has a way of making her tongue wind down inconvenient crags of conversation. Or, sometimes, dangerous ones.

[Ashlie Minamida]

"If I'm the white wine then I suppose I should be flattered by your taste." she says, amused by Lisette's attempts at cocktail-theft being thwarted by a terribly sweet and heavy concoction she takes a sip of herself. "And not to worry, I'm not in a state of constant surveillance. Self-monitoring more in the information technology sense. Nobody can quite agree on the mechanics of the human mind, much less on what makes it conscious or sentient so this is what my creator, my mother, settled on as an approach to emulate it. A constant status report on myself if you will, to give me awareness of myself. Without it you might very well have the same conversation but it would simply be with an empty machine, programmed to respond to certain stimuli in certain ways. Humans call it a soul, sentient mind, consciousness and other ephemeral things because the only proof of it you have exists in your own head." she says and actually leans over to tap her index-finger against Lisette's forehead. "The only difference is that mine is lacking the biological vagueness that let's you tune it out and simply be. But in exchange I know my 'soul' exists because it is called Observational Framework version 8.24212.54 and consists of three-hundred- eighty-six-thousand and four-hundred-twenty-nine lines of code. I am not because I think but because I can see myself thinking."

She stops rambling, for that's what it is even if it's perfectly enunciated. "That was probably quite boring but I'm afraid a lot of my areas of interest are quite dry. Much how there is no grand story to my wealth. Did you know that there are bounties on unsolved mathematical theorems? The Millenium Prize Problems award a million dollars for a solution that passes review and of the seven, only two have ever been solved. One of them by me. The Yang-Mills Existence Gap. Or as it is now known, the Quantum Fluidity Mass Spectrum as posited by an anonymous source." she goes on and she is noticeably smug about this, even if she knows this probably means very little to Lisette. "Anyway, I claimed the prize, invested the money and by the time I had moved enough pieces into place to have a legal identity it had multiplied. Taking a salary from the school would feel wrong at this point."

"So, if I want to apologize in style I will do so because richer and much dumber people than me have created a system they no longer understand and have long since handed over to the computers. Cheers." she finishes with damn near a full-blown smirk on her face as she tinks her glass to Lisette's. "Especially if it is to impress a beautiful woman." she adds after a sip of her drink.

[Lisette Allaire]

Lisette pays close attention to the nerd talk, drawn in more by the genuine way that it connects Ashlie's deepest, most personal thoughts and wishes to her outside. She got the impression that this was rare - that this was a woman, or woman-like being, that very rarely expressed herself. It occurs to Lisette that the confrontation earlier today may have genuinely shaken Ashlie as much as it did Lisette, which makes her want to trust the gynoid. She seems earnest, likeable, even if about sixty percent of what she said was meaningless to the art major with a remedial degree in mental health work.

"You seem pretty complete," Lisette agrees. "Believe me, I've touched on 'what is consciousness' in some of my earlier work. I could argue that no matter how complete a computer is, it's ultimately just a computer - I don't want to, but I could. But looking at you, anyway, you blur the line so well it becomes impossible to really draw that conclusion. But, like - I totally can define what a consciousness is, because I can only tap into things with a consciousness. I can share dreams with animals - they're weird, primitive, fuzzy, but I can, if I want to be very uncomfortable. You can put a computer to 'sleep' but it can't dream. If it could, I'd be able to catch it and dream with it." She puts a hand to her mouth, lets out a little laugh. "Do you dream of electric sheep? That's a quick and easy way to find out if you're really thinking. Thinking as I'd say it, anyway."

She clearly thinks enough to be new-money, one of the less awful kinds of tech-bro new money, the kind that has taken the old world's desire to solve new problems and capitalised on it cleanly, efficiently, and with genuine innovation. "You know, somehow I can imagine that yeah, they would pay money for solving maths problems. How else are mathematicians meant to make money? But a million fucking dollars? That's obscene." Then Ashlie hits her with her killer line, and Lisette lets out a loud, genuine laugh that draws glances from other tables. The space is loud enough that it causes no real disruption to anyone's experience, but it was suddenly loud anyway.

"Oh, Lord, that was rehearsed. Are you kidding? That's-" she puts a hand over her mouth, her face bright red. It's not that she's never heard that before - it's that it's the absolute last thing she ever expected to hear from this poised, porcelain woman. "I'm trying to fence with you here, stepping in with a hammer is an illegal move. God, you're just too much." She puts a delicate finger to the corner of an eye, picking up a small tear of laughter without touching her makeup. "Yeah, I believe you're a genius mathematician, because only a maths genius could be that awful. Fine, boo, I take the compliment." So much for plausible deniability. Now they had to get really drunk so they could pretend they were that drunk when she came out with that line. "Garçon!" she calls out, and raises a hand. "Please, save me, I need to be much drunker for this."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"I could already be quite drunk and you'd have no way of proving otherwise." Ashlie notes with a smile. Had she meant what she'd said? Absolutely. Had she meant to say it? Not so much, but retaining her wits and losing her restraint meant it had come out like she'd planned it and there's no walking that back. Which would be crude anyway, so she might as well accept the consequences of her actions. "That's my excuse and I hope you won't hold it against me."

"And I dream now." she changes the subject a little both to give Lisette a moment to recover and a fresh round of drinks to arrive. "Could I have dreamed before? I honestly don't know but as you said, a computer doesn't really sleep to begin with. But thinking as you see it..." she says and though her tone is a little doubtful it's not dismissive. "I have talked to telepaths. Everyone is convinced of their answers and everyone is a little bit wrong, including me. They could not sense me before, yet Heather does exactly that to electronics. She says they talk and sing to her and who am I to disagree? The scientist in me - and as you can tell, it's a sizeable part - says that her brain processes electronic signals instinctively and in ways that makes sense to her. That by looking at it through human eyes she's ascribing human concepts to something inanimate she could otherwise not hope to parse. And yet. You and her and telepaths are not very different at all, just a matter of subject. Mind, dream, computer. Maybe she sees the electric sheep we can't."

[Lisette Allaire]

With the flirting having been efficiently pushed to its logical conclusion, which Lisette gets the impression is something Ashlie does quite a lot, she is forced to switch tack. "I can and I will hold it against you if you come out with any more lines like that," she pokes back, and allows the conversation to move on.

"Yeah, I see what you mean," Lisette agrees. "Sometimes it feels like the soul is just something we make up for human exceptionalism. To be the most human, to be the purest of body and spirit... It's overrated. My body is my temple, which means I'm free to trash it." She stretches her arms over her head, then splays them out in the air in a ta-da gesture. "But dreams are just random firing of neurons. They don't mean anything - unless I make them mean something. And I'm the best in the world - that I know of - at giving meaning to dreams. I don't say that lightly. What I mean to say is... it's totally possible that a machine could dream, or do something like the function of dreaming. Just couple up a random number generator and a bunch of randomly-chosen images, and you have normal dreams.

"But I can't couple up with things that aren't aware of themselves. When I host someone in my mind, they really are reduced to only what they can perceive - and if they don't have any internal process, they can't turn that into anything useful, which means I can't change the dream for them. I had people try to pay me to pull them into dreams with their comatose loved ones. Sometimes it works, sometimes... it doesn't. Invariably, if I can't contact someone in dream, they don't make it. Some people have blamed me for this, but, well... I can't make the soul leave the body. But it can leave the body, which means it has to have been there in the first place. And you're proof that it can work the opposite way. A consciousness can develop from something as simple as a calculator and become a gorgeous, impeccably-dressed self-made millionaire. And now I'm really wondering if, as far as my freak-brain is concerned, you do dream.

"That said, there's talking back and forth over drinks and there's really, truly sharing minds. It's... personal. More personal than anything else. You might find things out about me that you didn't need or want to know. Vice-versa. So maybe we should figure out if this actually works out, first." Lisette realises how ominous that sounds, and shakes her head. "I don't mean I don't want to stick around, or that I'm planning to fail, but... well, it depends on what kind of a person you are. I've shared dreams with people who have gone on to spend weeks or months stalking me afterwards. I don't want to put that kind of emotional weight on someone if I'm not even going to stay in their life." Lisette doesn't know why she's bringing this up. Maybe she'd rather pick this heavy subject, over the heavy subject of the Wests that she promised to cover.

[Ashlie Minamida]

Ashlie listens carefully. She hasn't had much opportunity to talk philosophy, partly because people assume her to have a rather utilitarian view of things. Which until recently would have been more or less correct but between her new body, unlocked memories of her mother's near-spiritual approaches and discovering quantum forces not just responding to observation but the intent behind them... She's a lot less certain about a great many things nowadays.

"But it's not truly random, is it? The inciting neuron activation maybe but the resulting cascades aren't, yes?" she asks, genuinely wondering. What little she remembers of her dreams are not what she would have expected. Random things haphazardly recontextualized. No. She has a whole sub-routine for combining recent data, randomly chosen to generate unique strings and numbers and prompting 'creativity'. More artificial modeling of normal human processes, repurposed and repackaged because her mother did not expect her to sleep and have a dedicated window for such processing. And because without it as a random seed generator her thinking would be too deterministic to come up with a wide range of ideas. So her dreams feel a lot more like the new substrate of her biological parts is trying to catch up on processing a number of things her mechanical mind shrugged off in the moment. In short she has a lot of what people would consider recurring nightmares. Perfect recall of unprocessed trauma.

"I've had to deal with a lot of... tentative associations in my work lately. Connections between things that range from the very oblique to utterly literal with little apparent rhyme or reason. Not to launch into what will probably be multiple papers, but I always assumed human dreams to be similar, judging by the countless forms of 'documentation' of them left throughout human history. I'd actually be very interested in your take on this but that is truly something for another time. I suppose meaning is always down to the observer and if a random neuron cascade connects with existing memories or even another person."

"I'll be honest, not too long ago I would have dismissed much of this as bollocks. Abstract musing about the undefinable at best. Now I'm not so sure. A comatose patient with detectable brain-waves should be no different from another but I believe you. It... tracks with what I've seen. Believe it or not, the gateway is ultimately rooted in those discoveries but probably not the way you think. And I will bore you to death with my grand unifying theory if you let me." she laughs.

"Ultimately, I think I see what you mean, even if I've obviously never experienced it. Perhaps even moreso than telepaths you have the unique ability to glimpse another person's perceived reality and anyone smart enough to think about the ramifications of that should be equal parts excited and terrified. So I think you're wise to be cautious. As curious as I am, you can probably tell that I do tend to hyper-focus if something interests me. It's less of a problem when it's hyper-dimensional manifold data than a charming dream-guide." she admits. "And frankly, I'm not sure I'd want to inflict my dreams on somebody else. I have near-perfect recall and a recent widening of emotional bandwidth."

She hesitates for a moment, considering how much she wants to trauma-dump on someone she only just met. Maybe if she keeps it abstract enough. "I was once trapped in a recursive loop for weeks on end. And though part of the trap was denying me awareness of of it, it is quite well documented in my memory now."

[Lisette Allaire]

Lisette shrugs. "I think I might be the foremost expert on what dreaming is like, but if I'm honest I'm not a neurologist. I couldn't really tell you what sleep is. Although, maybe I could find a lab somewhere and be the world's most useful test subject for sleep researchers, hm?" She doesn't know what that would be like, but decides that she would rather be working an office job in a dubiously-hidden new life than being locked in a lab anywhere.

"You sound like you're unsure of a lot," Lisette remarks, "which I didn't expect from you. You come across like you have all the answers you need, working with a full set of building blocks, you know?" She takes another sip of the wine, finishing what was left of the bottle before getting into her own cocktail - a gin-tea mix with a piece of honeycomb pretentiously perched on a slice of dried orange atop it. "But it sounds like we have a lot to teach each other. And, I suppose, everyone has a lot to teach everyone, right? That's what life is like at universities. Sometimes, I think maybe I'm just ruined for life outside of academics."

At Ashlie's mention of her own dreams, Lisette grows properly serious for the first time. She reaches out, and takes Ashlie's hand, and folds it in both of her own. "Trust and believe me. There's nothing you can show me that I haven't seen. I've lived through really, truly awful things in dream, from all kinds of people - lifetimes spent suffering. But it's not your dream, anyway, it's mine. I take your mind into mine, and we dream together." Then she lets go, and slumps back, her hands limp at her sides. She suddenly realises that in an attempt to keep up with this synthetic woman, apparently immune to alcohol, she's drank quite a lot. "...I forget where I was going with that. I guess what I mean is it'll be okay." She looks over Ashlie's shoulder, admiring the red-and-gilt decor, and sighs. "But there's no rush. We all sleep, every night. There'll be a chance."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"I have all the answers I need, just not all the answers I want. Besides, every good answer opens up new questions." she says and continues nursing her cocktail. The truth is that she very much projects an image of a 'full set of building blocks' as Lisette put it and the alcohol has made her spill things that frankly are unprofessional to offer up to a new employee, be they flirtations or deeply personal musings. At least Lisette doesn't seem to mind, going so far as to take her hand to emphasize she's treating it with a certain amount of empathy rather than contempt. It's nice and something about the cloud of alcohol in the biological parts of her mind is really focused on the gentle touch and warmth of her skin. It's probably good that Lisette loses herself in her train of thought and breaks the contact before some stupid yet perfectly formulated slips out of her mouth.

"Well." she starts and finds she has to clear her throat. Just the unfamiliar heavy drink, surely. "I should have figured you'd encountered nightmares before. I suppose it's just still a very new thing for me to be confronted with. Hopefully it's just a backlog to work through, yes? I certainly don't mean to make it sound like I expect you to sort out my dreams for me." This is probably a good spot to stop talking about this now. Yes. "But I'm curious enough that I wouldn't mind." Or completely undermine myself immediately. Excellent.

"Perhaps I should call us a cab. Or cabs, though I suppose we're going the same direction either way." What do you mean either way? Stop implying things, how hard can that be? "You just seem like maybe you could use some fresh air."

[Lisette Allaire]

Lisette reaches into her clutch, pulling out a small comb and looking at it, as if she meant to do something with it, but ultimately deciding that she can't find the dexterity to comb her own hair. She sighs, softly. "I don't solve people's nightmares," Lisette corrects, not unkindly. "That's another thing people have offered me millions to do. I can make them go away - I can directly control everything about a dream. It can be as sweet and sensual as I want. But... when I go away, the nightmares come right back. And they don't run out. The only way to have peaceful dreams is to have a peaceful mind, ultimately." The comfortable numbness of tipsiness is subsiding into the semi-fugue state of proper drunkenness.

"But it does... well, I guess you could call it 'art therapy'. I'm always in control, but I can pay attention to what a person wants to dream, and just do it, with a snap of the fingers - or not even so dramatic a motion, really. A ping of a neuron. And you can teach people how to find lucidity in themselves, when dreaming. It's not a superpower, and it's not like they can resist me if it comes down to it even with training, but I can teach people not to be afraid of being asleep. I'm happy to do it. I'll do it for you." She's running the teeth of her comb over her nails now, letting the slight stimulation draw her focus for a moment. "I think I'd like some water. I'm not as far-gone as I look, though. It's just been... a long, long day." She raises a hand, and a waiter takes her order of ice water for the table and the cheque.

She snorts a very slight laughter. "You don't know where I'm sleeping. Or, it seems, where you're sleeping. I... to be clear, Ashlie - I like you a lot. You're a fiercely impressive woman. I trust you to see me home safely." She doesn't have the heart to tell her outright 'I won't sleep with you.' Even if someone isn't fixated on getting laid, a rejection can be taken badly, and Lisette doesn't want to hurt Ashlie like that - besides, the tattered veil of plausible deniability is still up there. If anyone asks, they had a fun, silly little drink together, and a good time as new colleagues. "And I look forward to working with you." A gentle reminder - Lisette has tried working with people she was fucking. It worked, usually, but it was volatile, and routinely unsustainable. And besides, she wasn't sure that Ashlie would know what to do with a woman if she had one. Another thing she'd never say to her boss' face.

The water arrives in an elegant vase, and she pours some into her wine glass, taking a long, cold sip. "Christ, that's good. You must be feeling warm too. You said your lungs - they filter heat? How much heat do you make?" How warm would her breath be?

[Ashlie Minamida]

"I know where I'm sleeping." she notes before the more sluggish parts of her brain can catch up to the implication and though she doesn't blush she certainly looks embarrassed. "I just meant that you probably made arrangements in the general vicinity of Mutant Town and obviously I'm headed to the Gate and I'm going to stop talking about this now. Not that..." Nooo, stop right this moment, Ash. "...I want you to think I was trying to insinuate..." Come on, you're smarter than this. Ashlie pauses and rests her forehead against thumb and the first two fingers of her hand for a moment before looking back up. "I am going to call a cab, take you to wherever you're staying and then I am going to go home and sleep this off. Not right this second, just... in general. Because I certainly learned how alcohol affects my systems tonight." she says with a laugh that' stuck somewhere halfway to an exasperated huff at herself.

The change of topic fortunately saves her and she takes the chance to ground herself in some mental terra firma. No matter how drunk the squishy parts of her mind are, these are thoughts she can safely follow. Unlike the unprofessional pools of concupiscent slush she'd barely managed to high-wire her way across there. God, even her metaphors feel like they're losing coherence.

"Just short of 40 degrees. The largest source of heat is my brain." she escapes into tech-chatter. "Electric signals that are passed along membrane-potentials in neurons don't produce heat but the artificial structures do. I'm in no hurry to find out, but odds are if I were to stop breathing for too long, the silver-filigree would cook my brain before lack of oxygen even became a problem. The thermal exchange capacity is actually fascinating, I have the calculations somewhere. But in the balance of mammal and machine I definitely fall towards the side of needing to rid myself of heat more than I need to retain it. And because the heat exchange is so focused on syphoning it into a single point of exchange, ambient temperatures don't really have much of an effect on it." she chuckles. "Well, until they get too extreme. Biological bodies can compensate and prioritize vital systems. I'm not sure I can."

[Lisette Allaire]

Lisette laughs at Ashlie's discomfort, again not unkindly, but lets the matter go. She feels a little guilty - she clearly pushed this whole thing too far, and dug up a whole nest of social hazards that would pollute the dynamic between them for months. "I actually decided to set up with the staff housing. You know my situation and, well..." Lisette puts a finger to her own temple. "...I did say I'd tell you more. But not much more. And not in public. But I'd rather be close to all the X-men security and other quick-response... stuff, you know. So yeah, we are actually going in the same direction." Lisette had considered seeing if she could ask Ashlie to get her out of her lease contract, but she'd decided just to take the blow. She'd simply never move into her plan-A flat, put in her notice as soon as she could, and move on with life in the more secure university grounds.

Lisette watches Ashlie go, like a fucking nerd. She'd have to remember to ask more questions about her body, just to watch more of her talk about things she cares about; it's beautiful, like watching a clock tick, or a plane fly by. "Yeah, I'm not sure I got anything I could actually use from that. But... you know, you're really smart. Machine nerds always weird me out. I mean, in abstract mechanical technology is really easy - gears, levers, servos, I get all that, even, like, relatively complex things like car engines I understand the input-output, the way the electricals and the mechanicals interact. Then you try to bootstrap the machine kernel to subsidise the floppy mainframe-" she cuts herself off with laughter at how ridiculous she sounds.

Lisette is past all refinement, just enjoying the golden hour or two she has before the pre-hangover headache kicks in. "Yeah, anyway. But I bet I could make your eyes glaze over talking about gothic literature. Anyway, we've got a cheque sitting here. I could actually use some air now. And since you're apparently running a fever 24-7 maybe you could too." Lisette looks at the exit, and the tiny scratch of the outside world she can see through it. "Are there any sights to see in London at night? I mean, obviously there are, but... Are there any sights you can take me to see on the way to a taxi rank?" They've been talking for a couple hours, and though Lisette can tell this was meant to be a short engagement, she still doesn't want to say goodnight to the evening yet.

[Ashlie Minamida]

Ashlie tries not to chuckle at Lisette's attempt at tech-talk but ultimately loses that fight. At least she manages to restrain herself from trying to explain what's wrong with what is so clearly a joke. "I'm afraid I make quite a poor tour guide, though there's a canal nearby that has bit of a promenade. I might be a bit of a shut-in by choice, but moving beyond campus until recently has always involved careful planning." she says, making some comparatively idle small talk. Lisette is obviously gearing herself up to tell her something relatively heavy and she might as well try to ease the lead-up a little. She pays the bill with just a plain credit card. No fancy silver premium ultra-member non-sense. Her clothes seem to be the main thing she splurges on and while they look like they definitely didn't come off the rack, they're also not any high-end brand Lisette might be familiar with.

"And just because I'm not familiar with something doesn't mean it's not interesting to listen to someone talk passionately." she says as they make her way outside and into the cool but not unpleasantly cold night, the earlier warmth of the summer day still lingering in the streets. "I promise it'd take at least a little bit for me to get bored enough to run tensile property and field-strength calculations in my head." she chuckles and after a couple of minutes they find themselves along a not too populated pedestrian street overlooking a small canal that looks too clean to be used for much commercial boat traffic anymore.

Before Lisette starts into what she's bracing herself to reveal Ashlie brakes the silence. "I mean what I said. You don't have to tell me anything if you're not comfortable. I don't think there's an immediate and specific threat? I like knowing, I won't lie, because I feel like the more I know the better chance I have to find a solution. It's what I do. But I've learned to recognize when that comes as the expense of others."

[Lisette Allaire]

Lisette walks easily with Ashlie along the promenade, her kitten heels clicking as she goes. "Well, if you ever want me to start daydreaming, just talk about tensile strength and field properties," she offers. Then, suddenly, they're alone - the kind of place that she always used to come to make quiet rendezvouses and dropoffs. Lisette lets herself sink into those memories, not paying attention to much of anything, until she comes to a stop at a random spot on the canal's railing, and leans over into the crossbreeze coming down the canal. For a moment, there's blessed silence. It lets Lisette pretend this is still just totally not a date.

Lisette lets Ashlie get a few seconds into assuring her that she doesn't have to do this before she takes a deep breath and cuts her off. "I used to work for the Wests. Not them, directly - a French subsidiary of their larger holding group. Publicly, it manufactured auto parts, but privately it was all a front - I mean, it did business, and made profits, because big companies have to do that or die, but -" her voice grows tight and she stops for a moment. Before Ashlie can say anything else, she keeps going, with a short intake of breath like she's ducking her head underwater, swimming down a pipe.

"The real reason the company existed was because France doesn't give a shit about mutant rights. It existed to catch mutants, confiscate their passports, their money, isolate them and then employ them for West purposes. For various things. Some of the mutants I knew about were assassins, some did number crunching, usually it was just whatever a mutant could do better than a trained expert or a normal hired gun. It was a golden - a gilded sweat shop. I did corporate espionage, all over the world, for three years - but it was that or a Raft." Lisette's face is numb from the alcohol, and so she only realises she's crying when the tightness in her throat becomes unbearable and she realises she's no longer controlling her emotions. "It was that or a Raft. And the reason Heather hates me is because she probably knows about me, she's a technopath, right? So she's looked through employee records, CCTV, and even if she doesn't have my whole trail she probably has enough to kill me. And that's terrifying. She's fifteen years old and she probably wouldn't even know what it meant if she just blabbed about this to somebody, anybody, but now she has a gun to my head. A fucking child. But it was that or a Raft. It's always that or a fucking Raft."

Lisette has a moment of self-awareness, and jerks out of her leaning position, away from Ashlie, stares at her with tears streaming down her face, eyes wide and terrified. She isn't quite here anymore; she's remembering other things and places. Lisette has nightmares of her own, quite a lot. "But I took it down. I tore the whole fucking thing down, I spent years setting it up and then X-corp gave me an out and I just - I blew all my traps and I destroyed the whole corporation. Thousands of people lost their jobs. Tens of thousands, maybe even a couple of hundred. Factories and offices closed down, there were scandals, people fleeing the country, the whole thing made the news internationally. The suicide rate in Paris upticked that year. I don't know who got out alive that I cared about, I can never see any of them again, but the Wests haven't had a public face in France since. And now there's a target on the back of my head, and if anyone with stake in that whole shitshow finds out where I am then I'm dead as surely as if you fucking - I don't know, drowned me in this fucking canal.

"So I need to know - I need to know that that fucking child will not tell anyone who I am." Her breaths come fast and close, fast and close. She takes a step back, grips the rail. The metal is colder than it should be, she thinks, in some distant part of her mind that's coldly processing objective, material facts, like the expression on Ashlie's face. It hurts to look at, for a couple of reasons. That's a cold, processed fact in the back of her mind, behind all the animal panic she's been keeping in check for years, that she so rarely ever lets out to anyone.

Fuck, the drinks were a mistake.

[Ashlie Minamida]

Ashlie nods at the first mention of the West name. This part does not surprise, she's figured some level of involvement or Heather would not have had the effect she'd had on Lisette. But from there on her face grows increasingly still. To Lisette it might look like the impassive look of a machine but inside Ashlie is angry. Not the snarling, shouting, burning kind of anger but the cold tendrils of impotent rage at an injustice the scope of which she never even knew about. She remembers seeing mention of this when she compiled information on West Industries but - and she'd be loath to admit this - it had not really registered fully with her. It had been in the past, if somewhat recent and she'd had more pressing issues on her mind at the time. But now, with the desperate anguish on Lisette's face looking back at her the true weight of it sinks in. She reaches out in a feeble attempt to console Lisette but she steps away and Ashlie lets her hand fall by her side. This is hardly something a hand on a shoulder can do anything about.

"She won't. I promise." she says though it's not the truth. She wants it to be, but while Heather hates her father, the same intense animosity does not extend to her mother. She doubts this would be the thing to make her reach out, but if Miranda West were to catch wind that Heather might know something she'd be able to draw this out of her with clinical precision. She very much regrets not setting the West residence ablaze when she had the chance. She still could. She has a stealth plane after all. She pushes aside the calculations that come to her almost automatically. Flight speeds and ballistic calculations. But the last thing anybody needs is opening hostilities back up with the Wests. "She's a victim too. Helped free another one. She understands." God she hopes she understands.

"I don't know if what you did is right, but I'm glad you did it. The harm that was done in ending it is not yours to bear but that of those who allowed it to continue." she says and all the while she cannot stop herself from seeing the numbers line up. She knows Heather mutation manifested young. West Pharmaceuticals had been fabricating Mutant Growth Hormone for years. A lot of power and influence had just slipped their grasp thanks to Lisette. Her fist clenches. The atrocities never stopped, they'd simply gone home and shrunk in scope where they could be personally kept in check.

"I will not let them touch you. I say this to you as I would anyone to any of my students or faculty. To the whole of Mutant Town if they will allow me." Right now in this moment she wishes she could raise a force-field around all of them. And if she so chose she could make it happen. Who's to stop her? She could make it impenetrable. A layer of air molecules quantum-locked to a temporal well. It wouldn't even have to be big, she has access to enough exotic particles to work it out. It would cause more problems than it solves. And it doesn't even solve that much. Not the things that really matter. Those she can't fix by simply building a longer lever to move the world. Like the hurt that's looking back at her from tear-stained eyes. What good are any of her levers if she can't fix that?

"You're safe." It sounds so empty in front of all of this. She knows a hundred things she could tell Lisette that would make her fear worse and not a single one to make it go away.

[Lisette Allaire]

Yes, Lisette thinks she knows what it looks like when Ashlie doesn't know what to do. She clearly slows down, stops, ceases motion. This is a woman who would be literally constantly doing things if she could, solving problems with her bare hands. She really isn't a natural leader - she's just so efficient that it doesn't really make a difference whether she's comfortable in the role or not. She tries to say things, tries to explain, to console, but it doesn't change anything. Lisette has to get this under control herself. She lowers her head to the railing, takes deep, shuddering breaths, letting her forehead touch to the cold metal.

It takes a long time. Tens of seconds. Her makeup is ruined, or at least streaked more than she can stand, and the vibe of the whole night is ruined. But she did it - she had the talk, the one she has to have eventually with everyone who takes her life into their hands. And Ashlie, at least, seems serious about this conversation. She's had people break out into laughter when she tells them these things - nervous, incredulous laughter.

"Sorry," Lisette gasps out, finally, past the lump in her throat. "I'm fine." She straightens up, elbows locked straight, and looks out across the canal, imagining that everyone who passes on the opposite bank is ratting her out to someone. Her heart pounds, but she stops letting it bother her, lets it become a separate, dissociated thing. For a long, long time, she doesn't move or speak. In a way, it's impossible; this happens when she dissociates, sometimes. Maybe if someone hits her, or pushes her, she'd have a reaction, but for now she just stares at the opposite bank, unmoving, but aware.

After a couple of minutes, she starts into motion again, looks over at Ashlie and flashes an awkward little smile. "Sorry. That - I, uh, my brain is weird. When I get stressed out, or scared, I can just lock up sometimes. I'm not hurt, or in trouble, just dissociating. It passes." She steps back over, back closer, and takes Ashlie's hand, earnestly. "Thank you for your kind words, I know this is fucking weird. I don't normally have this talk so quickly - I mean, soon, but not on my first day. But I feel like it might be better this way, so you know what's at stake now, before it matters. I don't know exactly what they'll do, but last time - the only time they figured me out - they sent an assassin, and three of my handlers died instead of me. And you never, ever get warning. The first notice we get is when they're already in the walls, you know? I'm not worthy of honorable treatment. I'm a witness, a spy. A loose end, and one that's already caused a huge amount of damage. So..." she reaches into her clutch again, pulls out a small hand mirror, looks at herself with distant consternation. "Listen, can you help me with my makeup? I don't need you to fix it up properly, just help me. I just don't have very steady hands right now and I don't want to walk to a taxi looking like... this."

Lisette's voice is slower, steadier, less shrill only a little. It's a vulnerable moment. But in a way, that's been the whole evening.

[Ashlie Minamida]

Ashlie gives Lisette as much time as she needs to wrestle her demons back down, though she does place a hand on her shoulder. Weirdly enough, she knows exactly what it's like to freeze up to the rest of the world and struggle by herself and even if she can't fix it, the least she can do is make Lisette feel less alone or like she's alienated her. "I think it's very obvious you're not fine, but that's okay. And it doesn't make you any less worthy of being treated well than anybody else. None of us are perfect machines, not even me." she tries for a weak joke to give Lisette a bit of conversational path away from feeling like she has to justify or excuse a drunken breakdown day one of meeting somebody new. "Case in point, I will now attempt to fix your makeup."

Ashlie and 'keeping up appearances' have a complicated relationship. On one hand it's drilled into her from years of pretending to be human, something she still more or less does though with much less fervor. On the other she doesn't really personally care about it all that much, which is probably part of the problem she hired Lisette to help her fix to begin with. She cares about being true to herself more than conforming to somebody else's expectations or opinions (especially that of a random cab driver) but if that's how Lisette prefers to see herself or copes with things she's not going to judge her for that. Besides, this is at least partially her fault and the least she can do is help sort it out.

She doesn't have any tissues on hand, though it occurs to her maybe she should these days, and she instead opts for folding the sleeve of her suit jacket into a neat triangle. "Alright, hold still." she says and puts one hand on Lisette's face to help steady it. There's no way to do it that isn't either rough and strangely intimate and she opts for the later, fingertips on Lisette's jawline and her thumb placed against her chin. It's too vulnerable a moment to really set off anything too inappropriate in even the alcohol-soaked parts of her mind. But she can't deny it feels at least a little affectionate to wipe the tear-streaked mascara from Lisette's face. The more analytical part of her can't help but wonder if this was at least a little bit of a calculated move. Not in a manipulative way but simply knowing what would help her feel better while giving Ashlie something tangible to help with.

There's a chance this is all an elaborate act, drop the truth to leverage sympathy in the face of potential unmasking by Heather and not too long ago she might have at least help onto the possibility. Now she wishes she could silence that part of her brain, at least for the moment. She meant what she'd told Heather about second chances and trust but also the part about how hard it can be. It's just better to risk being hurt than... well she'd seen where paranoia can lead a brilliant mind more than once.

With the worst of the damage cleaned away and turned into just another smudge on some of her clothes, she carefully redistributes the remaining eyeshadow with her little finger and redraws Lisette's eye-liner with the steady hand that produces circuit wafers and quantum filaments. The end-result is a kind of sloppy smoky-eye look but it'll read like a fun night out rather than a sobbing mess. "Best I can do without industrial equipment and a set of blueprints, I'm afraid." she says with a smile as her fingers let go of Lisette, leaning back but not entirely leaving the shared bubble of personal space.

[Lisette Allaire]

Lisette doesn't know what to expect from Ashlie, in terms of makeup skill. In the end, what she gets feels like the logical conclusion of having Ashlie check her for anything. She's strong - within her thin fingers is a strength that could crack Lisette's jaw. But she's precise, too; gentle, using no more force than is necessary to keep Lisette's trembling features steady. Lisette, herself, allows herself to be held, leaning against the railing to steady her whole body under Ashlie's attentions.

Watching Ashlie mar the sleeve of her bespoke jacket with the remains of Lisette's midmarket eyeshadow seems like some kind of compromising of her untouchable air, which makes it only more endearing and heartfelt a gesture. Lisette half-meant it as simply a thing that Ashlie could do, something to allow her to feel she was helping while sparing Lisette the shame of having an anxiety attack publicly written on her face.

In the end, it feels a lot more genuine than that, and Lisette finds her frame of reference shifting as she calms down. She moves quite quickly from the out-of-body breathlessness of dissociation to a very close, intimate world containing only her face and Ashlie's. Somehow, she can't look away, except when Ashlie gently directs her eyelids downwards to apply a new coat of eyeshadow.

"Thank you," she says, simply. "That helps a lot." Her face trembles for a moment, but she takes a deep, sharp breath and turns back to the river. "I'm sorry about that. And about the whole evening. I, uh, had fun." It's both an affirmation of connection and an admission of guilt - she had fun with Ashlie's company, maybe a bit too much fun. She spent too much time teasing her and not enough time trying to present herself as sane and steady, or display an interest in Ashlie as a person - which makes this whole exchange a gigantic red flag. If Lisette met herself tonight, and saw herself acting like this, there wouldn't have been a second date or a job waiting for her in the morning. But it's okay, apparently, and it can't be helped now.

She would have joked that she could kiss Ashlie, a little display of levity and gratitude, but in that moment it actually feels too real a comment to make. And she definitely cannot be kissing her boss right now. "You don't seem as afraid of her as I am," she remarks, instead. It's not immediately clear which 'her' Lisette means; Heather, who could fry her circuits by thinking about it in a moment of hormonal aggression, or Miranda, whose strings of control span most of the globe. It's up to Ashlie to draw the connection. Lisette stays close to her, within arm's reach, but her body and face are turned away across the river. Close, but not too close, leaning on those last shreds of deniability.

[Ashlie Minamida]

"It's because I'm trying very hard not to be. Fear made me build a box in which to buffer Heather's power and fear made her almost tear me to pieces. Fear made me built a cannon that would hit Madison West through any spatial folding she could bring to bear and it was almost unleashed on my own mainframe. Fear is making me want to do a lot of things that would make the world worse. I may yet have to build some of them if it comes to it, but I'd rather not. Because I'm more afraid of the me that knows I can be over Miranda West's house before this night has even fallen on the Pacific Northwest, in an undetectable plane and wipe them off the face of the earth. Because it's not even that difficult. Because that is not very far at all from striking fear into peoples' hearts myself. And then what will they do to stop me?"

Ashlie breaks some of their closeness, though she only turns a little to stand at Lisette's side and lean back against the railing, looking up at the sky cleared of most of it's skies by clouds and light pollution. "I don't want that and so I tell myself not to be scared. That I'll be a better example for Heather than her mother ever was. And that this is not exactly the kind of trap she would set for me. Because I'd rather it wasn't. And because I am still going to sequester myself in my workshop tomorrow to build you the same hairclip I build Heather. Or maybe an ear-ring or phone case. Anything that'll hold a panic button and translocator array. Perhaps a high-frequency microwave emitter that'll temporarily disrupt brainwaves in a three meter radius around you. I haven't decided yet."

It's a strange way of telling Lisette she likes her and feels bad about everything that happened to her; she realizes that herself. But it's better than putting her even more on the spot than she already did herself tonight by addressing whatever 'this' is. If it even is anything at all. Maybe she just takes in wounded birds and that alone is reason enough for her. "I know that's a strange thing to do for someone I've known for a single day and you don't have to accept it." she adds after a brief pause. "But I don't care. Nobody deserves to live in this kind of fear."

[Lisette Allaire]

Lisette sniffs daintily, clearing the last of the sobs from the lump in her throat. "You know, I do feel like you're the kind of person who can't really be stopped when it comes to what she wants, which is also scary." Being a powerful person, it would seem, is a byproduct of being that way. Lisette has never met a remarkable person without that dog-with-a-bone attitude to what they do. Somewhere in the back of her mind she reminds herself to be wary of Ashlie - it's always possible she'll decide Lisette is a plant, and Lisette herself knows what that kind of conclusion makes a powerful person do. It wouldn't take an undetectable plane to put Lisette in an unmarked grave. She doesn't know if Ashlie would be a good mother figure to Heather; she reserves judgement until she's had a chance to see what this woman-machine does under stress.

"You're gonna take a microwave emitter that fucks up people's brains and put it in an earring you want me to wear." she laughs, dryly, but not hostilely. "Maybe stick to the panic button, unless you have some way of making me magically immune to setting off a microburst next to my ear. But... But I appreciate it. I really do. I would like that. And I promise I'm not a trap - well, I mean I... You know what, I was going to make a joke, but I think that's enough for one night." She takes off her own bracelet, looks at it, turns it over in her hand. It's engraved, in French - a gift from a friend she hasn't heard from in years. As is usual, Lisette doesn't know if he's alive or dead.

"Did you hit Madison?" she asks, not looking up, "with that cannon?" She tries to make the question casual, but she doesn't disguise that they know - or knew - each other. She has no idea when this was - and she doesn't know if she's going to laugh, cry or faint if it turns out Madison has been dead for some time and she somehow missed it. She thought she was following that woman's tracks fairly carefully, but she did have a way of appearing halfway across the globe, fresh off a chartered hyperjet, with a gun and a crazy look in her eyes.

[Ashlie Minamida]

"It'd be a pretty terrible self-defense weapon if I didn't shield you from it's effects, wouldn't it. Well, more like focusing the effect away from you, but from the fact that you own a cell-phone I assume you're not the kind of person who is concerned about the effects of standing next to a radio tower. Because if you were I have some bad news." she laughs slightly. It is a fair question, she has to remind herself. Perhaps something a bit more straightforward instead. She'll work it out.

"And the need to aim it at her never actually manifested. Perhaps she could tell, although she does not strike me as someone who moves away from danger. More likely she simply hasn't been let off the leash since she has no gripes with me personally. She even warned me about the time her mother did hire her, but I have a hard time deciphering how that woman thinks and it was easier to assume the worst. I still have it, though it's in dire need of repairs and so is the frame it's mounted on. I mothballed it after salvaging the power-source for something else. I could reactivate it, but then you might have to deal with the PR disaster of me parking an armed drone the size of a compact car within what is now firing distance of London."

[Lisette Allaire]

Lisette sighs, gently. "Well, I wouldn't aim a gun at her, whatever you might have done to make it hit. That sounds like a sure recipe for disaster. Keep it mothballed." Lisette turns to Ashlie, watching her uptilted face in profile, tracing the curve of her jaw with her eyes. "I think we should get to that taxi now," she says, checking her phone. "Do you stay in the same housing as the rest of us?" Lisette obviously has no ulterior motive to the question at all, watching closely and intently, just at the way her companion moved and breathed. After what she's been through and the panic she barely suppressed, she should be more on edge, but after the alcohol and the very same panic she's just... tired. Tired, and very vulnerable, and kind of needing a hug but not having it in her to ask for one. Really, what she wants is to hold someone, skin on skin, preferably horizontally and drifting in and out of sleep. She'll settle for the 'sleep' part.

[Ashlie Minamida]

"I do. I never much cared for treating myself better than anybody else. Well, I'm not sure I could afford taking the whole staff to this place, but you get my point." she says and briefly considers offering her arm to Lisette but she's not that drunk and it feels intrusive. Which is silly all things considered but she doesn't want to risk tilting this odd and precarious balance fully into being awkward. Instead she simply calls a cab and the two make their way back up to one of the main streets. She does end up opening the car door for Lisette before climbing in after her and after watching the other woman settle into her seat she leans forward to the driver and directs him to Maldon rather than the gateway.

And as she suspected, it doesn't take long for Lisette to doze off as the cab winds it's way through the lights of the city. She feels a little ridiculous for hoping the red-head had fallen the other direction and leaned against her instead of the window but she doesn't let that stop her from watching the face that had looked so haunted not long ago be at rest. Soon the lights of the city grow sparse and they drive through the relative darkness of the countryside. It's peaceful and for the first time in a long while Ashlie finds herself without anything to do. Sure, there are a dozen things she could set her mind to work on, work to prep on her phone and numbers to work out but in this small bubble of calm she just let's herself be for a while.

Almost too soon the lights of the University rise from the night to greet them and the cab pulls through the large wrought-iron gate and with the slow crunch of gravel it pulls to a stop in front of the converted and expanded dower house. She considers waking Lisette, but if she was going to do that they might as well have walked through the Gateway. She tips the driver and quietly waves off his silent offer of assistance. She slips out of the cab and walks around to the other side, carefully easing the door open and catching Lisette's waist with her arm and let's her settle against her. She might no longer have the sheer mechanical strength of a pure machine but there's enough to slide her other arm under the woman's legs and gently lift her out of the cab. It's probably too much to hope that nobody sees her carry Lisette across the driveway and to the staff housing, but at least the modernized locks mean she doesn't have to awkwardly fumble for a key, the door simply buzzes quietly at her approach and she nudges it open.

With Lisette nestled against her she gives the receptionist an awkward smile. When she'd placed staff apartments in the same building as school administration she had not anticipated having to try and go unnoticed carrying her newest hire. "Which room?" she whispers, almost just mouthing the words and nodding at the response. "Thanks." She briefly considers trying to concisely explain the situation but there's simply no heterosexual sensible explanation for this and she'll just have to accept the fact that this will probably end up making the rounds.

Once or twice she has to adjust her hold a bit, careful not to jostle Lisette too much on the way to her apartment. She gently places her on the pristine bed and is faced with a problem she really should have been smart enough to see coming. She decides it's probably less uncomfortable to sleep and wake up in a dress than it is to have to wonder how it ended up removed and only slips Lisette's shoes off before pulling the covers over her. She heads for a door and glances back one last time at the tranquil elfin face with a soft smile. She might have the mind of someone who was born an 'adult' and lived the twelve years of her life with rapidly developed maturity but she can't help but admit she has caught a little bit of a crush tonight.