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It's an ordinary, quiet night. The . . . patrons, or whatever they are, of the lab equipment shop downstairs, took off about forty-five minutes ago.
There's silence, mostly. You can only be out at night in Sothis if you have business. But there's some business. Every so often a party passes under Katie's window. Their conversation is mostly what Katie has become accustomed to thinking of as "focused", though occasionally some is just downright tense or revelrous.
Wind. Distant insects. Dogs.
Something shuffles downstairs.
And continues to shuffle.
"Are we good?" The voice is insistent, alto, and right underneath Katie. And it's female.
"Yes, fine". Higher. If Katie knows what female halflings sound like, it sounds like that.
The shuffling moves deeper into the shop. A glass clinks. Laughter starts, whispering at first, then merely hushed.
"Oh my god." A third voice.
"All this stuff is fake, you know. This and this and this used to be one bespoke fixture."
"Fuck."
Whoever it is is going through the merchandise.
Expensive, heavily regulated merchandise. Katie's parent have only been in Ulunat for two weeks, but she's picked up that the proprietors of this place have gone to a moderate effort to secure it against thieves.
"What must I accomplish before you'll allow yourself to feel proud?", She asks while aiming another shot.
"I assume when I do you'll sensually handfeed me chunks of the corpse? You Urgathoans are into that sort of thing, right?" Swoosh goes the arrow.
She ponders this. It hadn't occurred to her that Katie would want pieces of the cop.
"Only if you share."
"And it's gotta be fair. Like cop-fair. New Abadaran fair."
She squeezes Katie's tiny waist slightly, hoping it's not too obvious she's wishing she could be increasing its squeezability right now.
"Like so fair you'll wonder what the point is of killing any cops for yourself anyway, if some big—well. Maybe not that fair. But you know. You have to give me a lot."
"Watching you pack your gut with the flesh of your enemies is its own reward." She in turn grabs at the bottom of Tazich's belly, not even trying to hide how much she loves its squeezability.
Growl.
"You don't get extra points for correctly predicting your own failure to focus, you know. You're in control of that outcome!"
"Someday I'm going to test how well you can focus when you're pressed up against my flab."
"I hope we can make sure Teg gets the blood, though. It breaks my heart seeing her wracked with hunger like that."
"Yeah, it's very sad."
She tenses again, indicating that Katie should shoot. It's unclear what Katie means by "the blood" but that's not at the top of the list right now.
Katie steels herself and summons the willpower to put her fantasies aside and get back to shooting.
Tazich has a somewhat easier time focusing, mostly because she's used to this particular activity. She thinks.
She has some mental energy left over while making the old familiar motions, lighter as time goes on, to notice that Katie is in her arms and smile where Katie can't see her.
By the time they finish, even with the loosening of Tazich's pulls, and although she can tell Katie is exhausting herself, the proportion of arrows hitting the target has actually gone up.
Katie is so ensouled.
"I don't think I'll ever stop being amazed what a quick learner you are.
Like, true, most of it is that you were just really expectedly terrible to start with, maybe anyone would be able to improve that fast from that baseline, but still."
Nuzzle. "Gods, you really know how to make a girl feel special. Am I really learning faster than you did?"
"I guess sample size of two, so we can't be sure if I'm unusually bad or you're unusually good."
