Ichante rubs her temples, the background count making her irritated, making everything sound like an unending stream of stupidity. “Lady” Tanya makes a reasonable point about dryads being as subtle as hellhounds at Westminster, while Becky responds with a long speech about… I dunno, dryad rights or something. As if you could put glasses on Becky and suddenly she’s not the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen?

“Really, ‘Batshit’,” she begins, her voice clearly expressing her incredulity, “you’re going to get a job at a diner?” The very notion of a dryad as a waitress is absurd to her, unless it’s at some AAA place catering to leering corpers. “I don’t think our timelines are that long. Busking is a better idea. You can begin immediately and it makes more sense, given that festival streets have lower traffic and more pedestrians. Drek, a face like yours might clear more in tips than this whole job. It’s a Saturday; we could get out of here and you can start tonight. What do you play, the pan pipe?”

That brings her to Zag’s point, which is valid and concerning. “If Silk’s throwing around number’s like this, it means we’re not making a run against some mom-n-pop corner market. If Silk doesn’t know who ‘they’ are, but knows that ‘they have interrupted our plans on several occasions, sometimes with devastating force,’ then I’d like to point out that we are now the plans that might get interrupted with devastating force.

“We need to take precautions, and not just safehouses. A brothel doesn’t even make sense. Either you’re a john and leave after you’re done” – she points to Al – “in 2 minutes or” – she points to Zag, who looks like he’s got better stamina, and less cancer – “20 minutes, or you’re a trick and you don’t leave at all. Silk’s not the only pattern adept and any opposition of this level’s going to get suspicious that we’re coming” – she winces, having set herself up for Al again – “and going like it’s a hotel. We need a buddy system, traveling in pairs or threes, but not mixing them much so that a pattern adept can’t draw connecting lines between the cells. We need disguises, magical or otherwise. Cueball here doesn’t exactly blend.” She juts a thumb at the very pale, very bald Ex-Gladius.

“We don’t need a leader; if we needed a leader we’d be corpers. What we need is a tiebreaker, someone to break the logjams that inevitably occur when you have seven gonks with eight different opinions. I’ll do what Becky says if she’s the tiebreaker. Probably.”

She agrees with Ex-Gladius. “Let’s break up this party and get this show on the road.” Get out of Puyallup, and this damn headache. “It’s Saturday night, so lets go mix it up on Beacon Hill and blend in with everyone coming and going from the rail station.”