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When the party has died down, Isabella, for one, is well and truly exhausted. She explores the palace until she finds a room with a bed in it, and into this bed she flops, still in her clothes and holding her staff and carrying the cordial in her pocket. She sleeps late, because the party kept her up so late and she hadn't really slept the night before; but around noon, she stirs, and gets up, and goes looking for James and wherever her backpack may have got to. The backpack she finds in the great hall where the principal mass of the party was; some enterprising creature took both bags from the battlefield at Beruna up to the castle for them, and she only wishes she knew who it was. She takes her bag to her room and carries James's with her and continues looking for her friend.
"Thank you," says James. "It's nice armour. I'm very fond of it. Is there something you want to talk about, here?"
"'No' is an acceptable answer, I'm not trying to put you on the spot or anything."
"Is 'yes but not talking about it works for me too if talking about it would be weird' usable?"
"Yes. Would talking about it be weird? I don't think talking about it would necessarily be weird."
"Well, based on current estimates of projected weirdness levels, what are we going to do?"
Isabella laughs.
"I think me and my notebook are going to go somewhere and I will get back to you?"
Isabella sneaks one more peek at James-in-armor and then scurries away.
James decides that while she has the armour on, she might as well go try out learning from the sword in it. So she'll be doing that.
Isabella comes and finds her again about an hour and a half later.
"Not exactly. But it - gets out of my way. It doesn't get tangled up, it doesn't jam, it doesn't poke, it's lighter than it has any right to be."
"And I still think it's going to be kind of weird but perhaps not prohibitively weird. Um, the part you probably figured out was that I think you - the part I said out loud actually was that you look nice in your armor and I am guessing you figured out that it was in like a 'I find you attractive' way."
"On the other hand, I barely remember what other humans besides us look like. And I don't think I'm actually quite bisexual? Because I have old notes about how pretty nymphs are and the notes are very much 'maybe I will be that pretty if I grow out my hair and get all willowy when I am taller' with no hint of anything else and that hasn't changed since. And nothing else around is human-looking enough, at least so far. And I have nothing written about you like that at all up until this morning. So I don't know how much of it is - anything you should find personally flattering?"