Chapter Text
Being a Librarian meant that Irene had plenty of experience with awakening in unpleasant or perhaps even unfortunate circumstances. She certainly had had her share of moments when she’d woken without memory of how she’d come to be unconscious in the first place, as well.
This time was one of those latter occasions. Well, and probably the former, too. It was hard to believe that this could be a fortunate circumstance given...well, everything she didn't know.
She was lying on a hard floor that felt cold beneath her shoulder blades. Unusually cold, in fact, as if it had been chilled somehow. She cracked open an eye and immediately had to squeeze it shut again. The light was overwhelming, the colors too bright and the contrast too strong. Not only that but her other senses felt strange as well, she realized -- everything felt very loud and she was able to smell...well, multitudes seemed an apt descriptor. She coughed.
"Irene? Irene!" It was the way that Kai said her name, his urgency and his possessiveness. It felt like his hands gripping her shoulders as well, biting in as he shook her. But there was something wrong with his voice, or perhaps her ears or --
Or perhaps it was something much more serious, because when she finally opened her eyes, it was her own face looking down at her.
Out of body generally meant dead. Or at least it had in every book she’d ever read about it. She hadn't exactly experienced it for herself before now.
A groan emanated from somewhere next to her, and she turned her head to see Vale, also sprawled out on his back, looking as though he was awakening from some kind of troubled sleep. Across from him, Silver was there too, in the same prone position but not awake, or not alive, and -- and where was Kai? She looked everywhere she could see but there was no sign of him, only a strange device in the middle of the room, with scorch marks and burns around it, signs of some sort of explosion.
Her head snapped back to look up at...at herself?...as the memories began flooding back to her. She sort of wished they wouldn’t.
“Irene,” her body said again. “Are you all right?” And that was her voice, she was fairly certain, but it definitely wasn’t her way of speaking, wasn’t her cadence or her tone… It was Kai’s.
“I am...not certain I’m alive,” she said honestly, and that was certainly not her voice. That finally made her look down at her own body -- only to find that it wasn’t her body, either.
She gasped and sat up abruptly, Kai’s hands...or her own hands...falling off of her shoulders. Her body sat across from her, crouched in a more elegant way than she’d have thought her body capable of, and that sealed it for her. “Kai?”
"Yes," he said immediately, actually managing to sound a bit irritated despite the utterly impossible circumstances that certainly seemed to more than justify her question. And gods, was that what she sounded like when she was annoyed? But no, probably not. It was just his typical annoyance coming from her vocal cords. "Yes, it's me. Are you all right?"
She considered that question, though thinking was unusually difficult at the moment. She still appeared to be experiencing some sort of sensory overload that was making her feel a bit lightheaded, not to mention the utter surreality of this entire situation. It was certainly possible that she was dead or hallucinating or drugged or...well, the list of possibilities was endless and if she kept sitting here thinking about them, Kai was actually going to start shaking her.
Irene decided to do what she did best in situations where she was uncertain of herself: dodge the question altogether. "You are -- in my body."
"Yes," said Kai. "And you are in mine. And I am going to murder Silver very painfully if it turns out that he isn't already dead."
It came back to her in a rush then: She and Kai had been having dinner at Vale’s as they so often did, or more precisely having after dinner drinks at the small table in his drawing room. Johnson had arrived unexpectedly, with a summons from Silver to Vale. There was still no love lost between them, but it had piqued Vale’s curiosity: He had wanted Vale’s help in examining some sort of suspicious device that had arrived in an unmarked package. Vale, of course, had been unable to resist a challenge like that and if Irene was being honest, so had she.
Johnson had seemed rather annoyed that she and Kai were tagging along -- almost as annoyed as Kai was at having to go see Silver -- but apparently, as Silver hadn’t explicitly said that no one else could join in, Johnson hadn't tried to stop them. Indeed, Silver had seemed rather delighted to see them, in that lascivious way he had that put Irene on her guard and made Kai glare at him. And he did genuinely have a device for Vale to examine, which they had all been debating about on the way over, much to Johnson’s continued annoyance.
Vale had gone right to examining the device, which looked like many of the strange devices this alternate had that were a mixture of technology and magic. He’d only been looking at it for a few moments though, just long enough for Silver to dismiss Johnson and make two inappropriate comments to both Irene and Kai, when suddenly some kind of light had emanated from the device, followed by a loud noise and then… That was the last thing she remembered, before waking up in an entirely different body.
Irene finally looked back at Kai...in her body...and said, “But if you and I have switched bodies, then that means…” She trailed off, all of this still a little too weird to articulate, but luckily Kai seemed to understand.
“Ah,” he said, in hervoice, which she was still completely thrown by. “That is true. If they’ve swapped as well, I will have to wait to murder Silver until he’s inside his own body again.”
“Whose body am I going to be inside?” Vale asked, eyes still closed. Irene really wished she could go back to being unconscious, because though that was Vale’s voice, and that was Vale’s body, that was definitely not Vale speaking.
“Your own body,” said Kai, every muscle in his -- well, in the body that he was currently occupying, even though it was hers -- body coiled and taut, looking ready to snap at a moment’s provocation.
Irene shot a pointed glance at Kai -- perhaps her mind would catch up eventually if she just kept thinking of him by his own name, kept rejecting the fact that he was in her body. But then again, would that be setting her up for an existential crisis when -- because it had to be when, she would not accept if -- they got back to their own bodies? Probably too late to worry about that now. The existential crisis was very much underway.
Kai made a face at her that said he didn’t like the idea of waiting to murder Silver, but acknowledged that he currently couldn’t do it without also harming Vale. And was that always what she looked like when she was disgusted or outraged? There was so much ridiculous nose scrunching going on. She decided it must be Kai’s flare for the dramatics rather than her own expression.
Neither of them got to say anything else, though, because Vale chose that moment to sit up. Although, upon further reflection, ‘sit up’ might have been a generous word choice. It looked more like he leveraged Silver’s considerably bulkier upper body up off of the floor by using his hips as a fulcrum. He looked himself up and down, expression introspective for a long moment. Then he smiled. “Ah. So that’s what it does!”
Silver, in Vale’s body, looked at his own body in a way Irene had never seen Vale himself look at anybody. “Wow. I am incredibly gorgeous.”
Irene closed her eyes and willed all of her problems to go away when she opened them again.
They did not.
Kai glanced back at Vale. “Did you set it off on purpose?”
“Of course not, Strongrock,” Vale said, with Silver’s voice. He had Silver’s arm stretched out in front of him and was examining his fingers as if he’d never seen any before. “I merely meant to examine the mechanism more closely. It appears as though it was much more sensitive than I anticipated.”
“Well!” Silver, as Vale, said with a wide grin. He hopped to his feet far too enthusiastically, while Irene still felt like hitting herself on the head so she could lose consciousness again. “What a wondrous device!”
“It will only be wondrous if we can switch back immediately,” Kai said. Irene was certain her own voice had never sounded so authoritative when she’d spoken with it.
Vale didn’t appear to be listening; he’d now moved on to pulling Silver’s long hair in front of his face to inspect it.
“Immediately?” Silver repeated, as if it was the most absurd proposition he’d ever heard. “And waste this opportunity we have to see ourselves from the outside? And do more than see?”
"And by 'more than see,' surely you are suggesting that we test the differences in our relative physiologies," said Vale, completely deadpan. Wry humor was an odd look on Silver’s face; somehow it managed to make him appear even more wily than usual. "Not to mention our individual abilities. My ability to observe and reason does not seem at all blunted by being in your body, Silver. Most curious. I wonder how your neurons and synapses are managing to cope with my typical thought patterns."
Kai snorted unceremoniously, clearly interpreting that statement as a clever insult, though it wasn't at all clear to Irene that it had been. She knew better than anyone how painfully blunt Vale could be when he was working something out and gods knew he had more than enough to reason through right now. It was plenty likely that it had been a genuine statement with the added bonus of being offensive to Silver.
"Perhaps my mind's better than you've given it credit for," said Silver. "I certainly don't feel immediately smarter in your body, so what does that say about you?"
"That the phenomenon requires further study," said Vale, unfazed.
"Well," said Silver, "further study sounds excellent to me. Particularly in the area of anatomy and physiology. I say we get right to work on that." It was incredibly disconcerting to see such a lecherous look on Vale’s familiar features.
"You would want to have sex with your own body," Kai scoffed.
Silver arched an eyebrow. "Need a little primer on the practice of self-love, princeling?"
Seeing Kai’s self-righteous anger on her own face was a new experience; she was certain she didn’t look nearly so composed when she was furious. He stood up in one swift move, managing to look powerful and intimidating even from her lesser height. “I need nothing of the sort,” he snapped. “Particularly not from you.” Then he reached down with both arms towards her, and yep, being helped up to her feet by her own body was an experience she was now having.
At first she accepted the help just because she was stunned, not because she thought she actually needed help in order to stand. But as Kai helped her up, she realized how much more—well, more of everything she had to account for. Kai was taller, more muscular, and stronger than she was, with quite a different center of gravity. Humiliatingly, she swayed on her feet, and Kai kept his hands in hers to steady her.
So this was what it was like to look down at herself. Though, clearly not quite, since she was sure her face never looked that pretty when she was the one occupying her body, nor could she look that serious in her concern. Kai’s draconic presence must extend to whatever body he inhabited.
Silver cleared his throat next to them, and he had an unmistakably suggestive smirk on his lips — even though they weren’t his lips. “Surely you aren’t going to pass up that opportunity, though, are you?”
"What opportunity would that be?" Kai asked icily. There was that familiar edge of possessiveness in his voice that probably ought to bother Irene -- He was, after all, still her student. But somehow coming from him, it never did. And at the moment, she was mainly trying desperately to stop her head spinning at seeing that reaction on her own face, hearing it come out of her own mouth.
"Oh, come now," Silver wheedled. "It would take a truly blind and brain dead fool to miss the attraction between the two of you. Living together in such close quarters, both of you just so--"
"Don't say another word," Kai broke in. His tone was so cold, so acidic that Irene found herself expecting to see her own eyes darken like the stormy sea, scale patterns on her own skin. But that didn't happen, which probably meant that it couldn’t happen while he was occupying her body. Interesting.
"We're colleagues," Irene snapped. "That's all." She caught Kai’s subtle flinch in her peripheral vision and wondered whether she'd have to remind him later that they were friends as well. She just wasn't about to say as much with Silver being so...well, Silver.
"Even if I did believe that," Silver drawled, making it clear that he didn't, "there's a first time for everything."
Irene made a sound of frustration, which she was surprised -- though she shouldn’t have been -- to hear come out as the sort of growling sound she heard from Kai when he was particularly angry at something. “Then why don’t you make this the first time you think of something other than sex?”
To her continued surprise, Silver’s smirk turned into a downright delighted grin. “My, my, little mouse; you have quite a tell in this body, don’t you?”
“What are you--?” Irene began to ask, then looked down at herself and had to bite back a curse when she saw her hands -- Kai’s hands -- and the scale pattern that had bloomed all across the skin on the back of them. She looked back up at Kai in horror, and judging by the way he winced, the pattern was on the skin of her face as well.
“Absolutely fascinating,” Vale said, coming closer. Irene half expected him to whip out a magnifying glass and peer at her through it. “So the physiological responses a body is capable of must stay with the body, even if the consciousness transfers.”
“So I could fully transform?” Irene asked, heart hammering in fear at the thought. “Without meaning to?” She looked to Kai, who managed to convey, even with her face, that expression that meant he couldn’t give her the answer she wanted.
“Well, it would be unlikely,” he said slowly, “but not impossible.”
"How unlikely?" Irene demanded, heart rate picking up as panic spiked through her cold as ice. The scale patterns she was able to see on the backs of her hands deepened and that did absolutely nothing to help matters. It was shocking how responsive it seemed to be; she had known that Kai had impressive self control but this was another level entirely. If she transformed entirely inside of the Liechtenstein embassy, it would be not only incredibly dangerous but worse -- completely humiliating.
"Well," Kai said carefully, "it takes a great deal of energy, particularly with the chaos level in this alternate -- and the chaos level in this building. It also takes some amount of technique. It isn't just a simple loss of control or an involuntary function."
Silver arched an eyebrow. "So it isn't like becoming erect is what you're saying. Though I must say, I have always thought that dragons in their bestial form do resemble incredibly large spiky phalli."
Kai’s eyes -- well, Irene’s eyeballs, technically speaking -- weren't capable of flashing with draconic fire at the moment. But it didn't matter because the intention was all there, still read perfectly clearly. "Vale. I need you to get him out of your body immediately so that I can kill him."
“I am merely advocating for scientific research, and experimentation,” Silver said in an entirely too innocent voice, which was entirely too weird to be hearing out of Vale’s mouth. “Vale understands that, don’t you?”
“Yes,” he said, in the kind of serious voice Silver had certainly never used. “But I also understand the urge to kill you. Let’s see the damage to this device, shall we?”
The word damage sent a fresh wave of anxiety — and a fresh wave of scales, probably — over Irene; in the midst of everything else that was happening, she had managed to completely forget the explosion that had clearly rocked the device. The device was still standing, as were they, so it couldn’t have been too horrible, but anything that could leave those scorch marks on the floor couldn’t have meant anything good.
“Irene,” Kai said quietly, hands on her arms; a strange sensation, as he had to actually reach up in this body to reach her upper arms. “Take a few deep breaths. Try to center yourself. And don’t curl your fists like that.”
She looked down and saw that the biting sensation in her palms was actually her own claws digging into the flesh there. She gasped and unclenched her fists to examine them. They were sharp and dangerous-looking, but also rather beautiful. She wished she had the presence of mind to admire them better right now.
"Sorry," she murmured, feeling a rush of guilt and embarrassment as she realized what she’d been doing. That predictably made more scales appear, though the claws didn't seem able to grow any further than they already had. She had a momentary mental flash of an overly dramatic werewolf transformation scene from some terrible forgotten movie, only it was her trapped in Kai’s body and turning into a dragon. She wondered if there was any way to do that wrong, to get stuck mid-transformation or -- or -- She needed to stop thinking about it immediately or she was going to end up finding out firsthand. The absolute last thing she wanted to do was somehow damage Kai’s body while she was occupying it.
"Irene," he said a bit more urgently, hands stroking over her arms now in a way she would have protested as inappropriate under any other circumstances. She wasn't about to refuse the way it grounded her now, though. "Irene, look at me. I want you to breathe with me and try to relax a bit more each time you exhale."
She did as she was told, and she did think she managed to achieve something better than panic, but it was a peculiar result. There was an intensity in his gaze, the odd particular vulnerability she’d come to associate with Kai. Only now she was seeing it on her own features -- her own dark eyes, lightly freckled skin, strong cheekbones and jaw -- and gods, was there anything more disconcerting than feeling this sort of desperate attraction toward oneself?
Well, probably turning into a dragon and bringing down the roof would be. Fortunately the breathing trick did seem to have helped with that for the moment.
"You feel like this -- all the time?" she asked Kai, and even she couldn't be entirely certain whether she meant the scales and claws or...the rest.
“Royal dragons are taught to control our emotions from childhood,” he said, which didn’t entirely answer the question. He spoke so rarely of his upbringing though that she wasn’t about to protest the distraction. “Regular meditation helps. For now, just continue to breathe. That’s it; breathe, then relax. Breathe, then relax.”
It was unfair how he managed to have such a commanding, yet soothing tone even in her voice. His presence was far too strong to be contained by her body, she supposed.
“Good,” Kai said after a few moments, and she realized she must have gotten lost enough in those thoughts that she’d managed to forget some of her anxiety. Looking down at her hands, she saw that the claws had disappeared and the scale pattern, while not gone, had at least faded to something that could be passed off as some strange goosebumps.
“Thank you,” she said softly. She was still embarrassed at having her emotions so exposed this way, but if she kept thinking about that she was going to have the problem all over again. Besides, Kai made it easy to focus on him no matter the body he occupied.
That was, until a rather amused snort emanated from beside them and she remembered that there were other people in the room. Vale was concentrating on the device, but Silver…
“Oh, don’t let me interrupt,” Silver drawled, grinning with abject delight as he glanced between her and Kai. “Oh, or do actually, that would be fun.”
"If you touch her," Kai growled, then trailed off, an approach that was clearly intended to sound more menacing than anything specific he could have chosen.
Of course, it had no such effect on Silver, who just grinned. "If I touch her, what will you do, princeling? I do believe you've already promised murder, so that would appear to leave you with precious few ways to up the ante…"
"Try me," said Kai, shifting into a defensive posture, which was stymied somewhat by the fact that he was not only in an unfamiliar body but also long skirts.
Silver laughed. "Tempting. However, I wonder if I even need to touch her."
Irene caught her breath as he shifted closer, and she felt the familiar brush of his glamour. She’d fought it off enough times now that she knew how to recognize it, half expected the telltale burning of her Library brand -- only to realize that she was not branded in this body. He took another few steps toward her, raising a hand in a motion as if he was touching her face, but still a couple inches away. Suddenly she wanted him to touch her, wanted to drown in him, wanted --
The press of claws against her palm again broke the spell, and she abruptly realized that she was feeling a powerful wave of nausea and malaise beneath the false attraction. The effects of chaos on this body?
"How curious," said Silver, cocking his head toward the claws and freshly erupted scales. "I do believe this means my powers still work in this body. Or perhaps it's that she is attracted to this body on its own."
"No," Irene fibbed. "It's nothing of the sort. This is anger. Pure rage, in fact. Also disgust." She could tell from the way Kai was looking at her that he knew better, but Silver didn't know her as well as he did. And Kai was loyal to a fault.
“I echo those sentiments,” Kai said — or more like growled. She had never been able to make her voice do that before.
Silver clearly wasn’t buying it, at least not completely, judging by the entirely-to-satisfied smirk he wore. “I know what the effects of my glamour look like, princeling. Though I must admit, I’ve never had the joy of seeing this draconic reaction before.”
“Are you trying to make me turn into a thirty foot dragon right now?” Irene snapped.
“Well, not in this room,” Silver drawled, waving his hand around. “I’d rather not have it redecorated. But perhaps somewhere else…”
“There will be nowhere else,” Kai said irritably. “Because Vale is going to switch us all back now and then I am going to show you what I think of your disrespect. Right, Vale?”
“Well,” Vale said, with a very worrying throat clear that instantly made Irene struggle to remember to breathe calmly. He was holding a small mechanical device, smaller than the damned contraption that had caused this mess in the first place, and so was probably a part of it that had been blasted off. It looked far more charred than the rest of it, and the top of it even looked more than a little melted. “I believe we all know what you think of him, Strongrock, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to contradict you on the now part of your statement.”
“What do you mean?” Irene pulled away from both Kai and Silver, attempting to stride toward Vale with all the urgency her current panic suggested. She managed it with only a couple stumbles over her own -- well, no, Kai’s, that was the whole problem -- feet.
Still, it was enough to earn her a snicker from Silver behind her and a raised eyebrow from Vale, who still seemed as interested in their current predicament as he was in getting them out of it. Well, of course he was, because it was probably the most unbelievable, mysterious thing that had happened to him in recent -- well, who even knew how long. She looked down at her hands, saw scales emerging yet again, and in that moment cursed her love of detective literature.
“How curious,” said Vale, as if on cue. “You don’t appear to have acquired Strongrock’s natural grace along with his body.” The fact that he was saying that to her with Silver’s face made it worse still.
“You try suddenly getting several inches taller,” Irene growled, as if finding himself in Silver’s body was any less strange for Vale. She was aware that she was being irrational and she officially did not care. Nothing about this situation was rational. “Why can’t you reverse this immediately? You are the one who got us into this mess!”
Vale managed to look completely unimpressed as ever, even having to raise Silver’s eyebrow rather than his own. He held up the burnt piece in his hand as if she was supposed to have any idea what she was looking at. “This is a rather essential part of the machine, Winters. It’s what I touched to cause this mess, as you put it. We’re going to need a new part in order to make it work again.” Then he paused and looked at her thoughtfully. “Unless you are still capable of using that Language of yours in this body, and you’d prefer to just fix it now?”
That probably should have been the first thing she'd considered: whether or not she could still use the Language. The whole ‘being trapped in another person’s body’ thing was really throwing her for a loop for some reason.
“I would probably need to know the names of each specific part,” she said, looking at all the complicated, and burnt, wiring. “And how they work. I’ll need a simpler test.” She was tempted to do something to Silver, but he was in Vale’s body so that was out of the question. However, they were in his house…
Looking around the room, there were plenty of objects in here she could easily manipulate with the Language, assuming she retained the ability. Her eyes caught on a particularly gaudy vase sitting on a marble table along the wall. It was painted with supposedly “artistic” nude images that were really just tacky; she knew it wasn’t actually art because Kai had sneered at it when they first came in.
“Vase on the marble table, with the -- ” She hesitated for a moment in her instruction. Partly it was that it was very strange hearing the unique sound and phrasing of the Language produced in Kai’s voice, when she knew perfectly well that he wouldn’t be able to do so until he’d sealed himself to the Library and become a full Librarian. If he ever became a full Librarian. That was not a thought she needed to be focusing on right now, when her emotions were running high and so painfully visible on her skin. What she ought to be focused on was the fact that her ability to form the words of the Language at all was a promising sign. She needed to finish her command, though, before she got too sidetracked. “Vase on the marble table, painted with the likenesses of unclothed women, fall over onto the floor.”
Irene didn’t typically experience anxiety about her use of the Language being effective; on the contrary, she tended to make mistakes when she over-exerted herself without thinking of the toll. Or when she found herself unexpectedly unable to use it. So it was an odd feeling now, holding her breath through what felt like an eternity -- but was probably only a split second -- in which nothing happened. Then the vase tilted, tipped, and rolled dramatically onto the floor, where it shattered with a crash. Fragments of porcelain went flying in all directions, and Irene abruptly realized she hadn’t accounted for that. Still, the fact that it had worked more than made up for the mess.
“Hey!” Silver protested. “I said I didn’t want you to redecorate the place!”
“And I’ve said repeatedly that I didn’t want you to glamour me, so consider us not remotely even,” Irene answered tartly.
He pursed his lips, clearly still irritated, but he seemed at least a little bit less inclined to piss her off now that he knew she could still use the Language.
“Trust me, she did you a favor,” Kai said. Perhaps once this was over — because it had to end with them getting back in their proper bodies — he could teach her how to look so regally smug. Clearly her face was capable of pulling it off; though that could just be his draconic charisma shining through again, because there was no way she could ever look that attractive while doing it.
"And perhaps this means that you can do all of us a favor by repairing this machine?" asked Vale, gesturing to the device that had gotten them all into this mess. Machine certainly sounded less menacing than 'suspicious mad science technology that turned me into a dragon and now may be irreparably broken,' but she wasn't sure she was in any mood to be charitable toward it. She also didn't like how hopeful Vale looked, despite the fact that she’d previously told him it would be difficult to use the Language without precise vocabulary. If he was hoping that she could do this, it meant he had yet to devise a better plan.
Why couldn't there ever be a time when someone else was responsible for fixing things while she sat back and watched? Why did the best plan always have to be her plan, even when she wasn't in her own body?
She allowed herself precisely three seconds of wallowing in self-pity, then took a deep breath. "All right. I'll do my best. But you had better put it down first."
Vale nodded and moved over to set the piece on the table the vase had just vacated, bits of porcelain crunching under his feet. Then he stepped back.
Irene took a few steps toward it, examining it as closely as she dared before attempting to construct a sentence. "Components on the marble table in front of me, be mended and return to your previous state."
For a moment it looked like it was going to work. Some of the char marks receded, a few cracked bits merging themselves back together. But then it all fell apart into separate pieces, apparently having reverted back to its form before anyone had assembled it into functioning technology. That was what she got for attempting this with something she didn't understand.
“Did it work?” Silver drawled, sounding thoroughly unimpressed.
“Clearly it didn’t,” Kai snapped.
“It does seem to have broken it further,” Vale observed matter-of-fairly.
“Well, you try, then,” Irene said irritably. “I told you it probably wouldn’t work.”
“It’s no matter,” Vale said, scooping up the pieces with far too much cheer for the situation. Something told her he wasn’t that upset about getting to study this further. “You may all now do me a favor, and accompany me back to my rooms.”
“Now things can get interesting,” Silver said approvingly. “Though why you would want to go back to your rooms when I have much more space here, and plenty of beds--”
“Please don’t finish that sentence,” Irene said, feeling her temples beginning to throb. “That is not what Vale meant.”
“Of course not,” Vale said with a repulsed little shudder. “I have done extensive research on experimental technologies, and I’m sure I have the notes back in my rooms that will tell me how to fix this device.”
“And you require all of us for that?” Silver asked in a bored drawl.
Kai scoffed. “Do you really think we’d let you out of our sight while you’re in Vale’s body?”
“Do you really think you can stop me?” Silver asked, like it was a dare.
Before Kai could respond, with what Irene was sure was going to be a resounding yes, and possibly an attempt to demonstrate how, Vale stepped in, still entirely too cheerful. “We wouldn’t dream of trying. In fact, maybe we should take the time to split up so that I can get a haircut. I’m finding all of this length simply dreadful.”
Irene smirked, delighted, as Silver’s face — well, Vale’s face — paled in horror. He cleared his throat. “Well. Perhaps I should stick around after all, to see if you all ever decide to do any actual worthwhile experiments.”
“Excellent,” Vale said, already heading for the exit. “Onward!”