He grins widely at that. "Let's go to the food hall, neither of us needs to sit but it can be fun to pretend."

"Yes! Let's."

He leaves the line entirely and follows Zagreus, looking much more confident than he has sounded throughout this conversation, and looking in particular like he is supposed to be here and not in the line. 

There are enough other shades milling about and very definitely not in line to speak to Lord Hades that he doesn't stand out.

He turns right from the direction of the pool and then right again into a spacious food hall. It looks even more spacious for how empty it is; its only customer seems to be a tall one-winged blue lady with many piercings. "Oh, hey, Meg."

"Zagreus," she greets in a drawl. "Who's your friend?"

Agatinos bows deeply. "They call me Agatinos, Kindly One. I pray to remain beneath your notice."

"What a respectful boy. You should learn a thing or two from him, Zagreus."

"What, grovelling? I didn't know you were into that outside the bedchambers."

"Watch your words," she says in a warning growl. "I should get back to work anyway. Enough of a forced break for now."

"Good luck! Maybe next time I won't beat you so soundly."

"You will not."

And she disappears in a puff of dark smoke.

"Sorry. About the grovelling. I just - if all goes well there's no harm done, and if all doesn't go well I would in fact rather remain beneath her notice."

"Oh don't worry about that, I was just needling her. —we used to date, for some more context."

"Ah. I suppose if you've a taste for, uh, beautiful yet vicious women."

Agatinos sits down at one of the tables and looks around. "Wouldn't have expected the lounge to get... spruced up like this? I've been in a few times over the centuries and it's been pretty static, all told."

"Well, first time I tried to leave Cerberus kicked up a fuss so I've been putting in some improvement requests with the Contractor. Sort of as an apology, but also I like the liveliness." He sits at the table, too.

"Good of you. It looks very nice."

Agatinos suddenly leans over the table and says, "I want to come with you."

"—come with me where?"

"The surface. I - I hate it down here so much. In Elysium, everything's fake - the trees mock me, the waters of the Styx, the - the soil is made of crushed gemstones, do you know how annoying that is to a nymph?" His hands twist and pluck at each other. "Asphodel was almost alright until the flood. Tartarus gives me nothing. The Halls themselves - I could maybe be alright in the forbidden garden, but it's. Forbidden. Obviously."

He breathes in and out. "I'm - I'm not asking you to take on dead weight. I can fight."

Zagreus blinks a few times, his eyebrows raising slowly as he hears the tale, but by the end of it he's beaming widely. "I think my father might be less lenient on you than he is on me, although I suppose not very much so, given he is still confident in the imepentrability of his walls outside. Are you sure?"

"I'm very sure. If he tries to punish me - well, he can try."

Now his eyebrows are as high as they'll go. "He is the god of the dead," Zagreus points out. "He can try."

"Yes, well, he's been tormenting me quite effectively for a few centuries now without any conscious effort on his part, and frankly I don't know that the whips and chains would be much worse. Perhaps he'll light me on fire, perhaps he'll have me repeatedly flayed - the concept of spending another hundred years, another thousand years, without feeling real water on my skin again, makes it seem a bit academic."

Zagreus extends his hand towards the shade again. "In that case, welcome aboard!"

"Delighted to join you," the shade says modestly, taking his hand.

Zagreus withdraws his hand and assumes a more thoughtful expression. "Do you have any weapons?"

Agatinos reaches into thin air and pulls out a pair of pink-and-blue crystalline makhairai, then lets go of them and allows them to disintegrate into sparkles.

"The Elysian aesthetic is also somewhat grating," he admits. "But I can kill with them perfectly well."