“Is anyone going to tell me anything about that interaction.”

"I suspect your presence to be the reason Ariel decided to delay our discussion, and I'm hardly going to be so rude as to disregard her wishes on this topic.  Was there anything else you wished to include in our introductions."

Jaime wants to be annoyed at this person’s strong and immediate impression of condescension and evasiveness, but she’s not quite that hypocritical. She settles for a vague veil of general misanthropy. 

”No.”

She exits the room without any particular dramatics and searches around for Ari.

Ari is standing outside her room, double-checking her pockets for the keycard.  She doesn't seem to notice Jaime from down the hallway.  Shortly it becomes pretty clear she doesn't have it; she tips her head to rest against the door, closes her eyes, wraps her arms around herself, and just....sets there, for a moment.

“Do you have any context for what just happened.”

"Jesusfuck.  Jaime.  Hi.  You startled me.  - Uh, not?  In the middle of this hallway?  And I don't have my room key."

“I’ve mostly progressed beyond the point of making unintentional sound. Is anything happening that I need to deal with immediately, or is it non-urgent.”

"You don't have to deal with it at all.  - Uh.  Possibly you have a right to know," why did she say that "but not like." shit "It's not that big of a deal?" fuck "Actually."

“I now have basically no information on where this situation is on a scale from ‘you, personally, are being severely mistreated in some way’ to ‘you were at some point mildly criticized’. Do you see why this is a concerning amount of information to have.”

"Yes.  Also that might be too narrow.  Also also, hallway."

Jaime has not in fact been spending all of her magic immediately upon getting it; she pokes at it about how expensive a short term ‘this pair of people can only be heard by each other’ or ‘only people in this bubble can hear other people in this bubble’ effect might be.

Not terribly.  She can even use it to level her unnoticeability if she routes it through that.

Neat. She does that.

“Nobody else can hear us, as of the beginning of this sentence. Are you going to tell me anything.”

" - Do you not have your room key?"

“Please either give me a quick rundown before we do literally anything else, or tell me to fuck off.”

"Do you remember when I was like, 'here are all the reasons it would be a bad idea to make Alexandra not care about you, but maybe we should anyway'?"

“Mmhm.”

aaaaaaaaaaa

"There are sometimes.  Circumstances....where less of those reasons.  Apply.  - But for like, in the opposite direction."

“Is someone fucking with your brain or are you fucking with someone else’s.”

".....She does it symmetrically?"

“Let me check my notes, oh, wow, still not a fan. Do you want to do a quick magical parasitism session in my room, I want to have more magic on hand right now than I do.”

"Okay."

She breaks the privacy effect.

Walk, walk, fashion baby, work it move that bitch - oh look they’re at her room.

Nom. Investing the proceeds of that nomming into being better at defending against (and incidentally better at actively doing) relationship manipulation. 

“Do you feel comfortable telling me anything else.”

(Ari sits in Jaime's room's armchair for the nomming, flops her left arm where it's accessible, and otherwise curls up around the chair's oversized decorative pillow, drawing her knees in.  She shoves her face into it until the amount of air she can get from this position becomes noticeably insufficient, then she - oh whatever she can't hold quite as much magic as she's going to get from this anyway.  There, now she won't need to breathe for an hour.  She idly wonders if this'll help with a panic attack, if it stops hyperventilation.)

She tilts her head enough that the sound will carry at all but doesn't actually come out from the pillow.  "I remembered in the middle of this that you can just get blood here.  Pre-packaged, so it doesn't give anybody else magic.  If you didn't want it from - uh, if you wanted it not from me.  They do room service, even, pretty sure."

“I’m most likely going to a different hotel. Are you going to say anything else about being symmetrically mind controlled.”