Laurent, still slowly catching up on the last five minutes of his life, barely notices this development until it's already happening but then notes in a distant corner of his mind that his teammates are very good at things. Which is good because right now he is incredibly useless.

Eelesia twitches when the milk spills into her mouth, and just the contact is enough to let her swallow, and then cough as some of it goes down the wrong way. Gak. After a moment, her body relaxes and then alertness returns to her. She looks up at Sky and Laurent, realizes what happened, and winces. "Oops."

Headpats for- Pats to whatever bit of her she can reach, for Sky.

"...Laurent?"

After a couple more steps he manages, "—sorry—"

Eelesia shakes her head, musters herself, and stands up.

"No. I'm sorry. I reacted on reflex and it was the wrong reflex. Definitely you don't need to sorry for anything. You didn't electrocute me, you could've just zapped to shore but you didn't and I think you were acting on reflex too?" She's going to avoid the word 'panic' for the next few minutes, she thinks.

Sky, meanwhile, goes back to help Coventina.

This consists of Coventina using Flesh for Flesh to make everything terrible and then kissing her until everything stops being terrible.

Wow is she glad she got Stormheart. Electrocution sucks and even if pain is A Way Of Making Her Helpless she does not like feeling like she has a muscle cramp in her everything and also being on fire.

Laurent has... some sort of reason to that, probably. He'll think of it in a minute. He's still reviewing footage in his head, connecting up memories with each other, realizing he remembers getting into the water even though he didn't notice anything strange at the time, triple-checking all his actions and motivations from multiple angles. Trying very hard not to claw his own skin off, an especially counterproductive urge since the memories suggest that if he had psychic fish on him he'd be able to tell.

"No," he says to Eelesia, "sorry for—for being just generally useless—"

Eelesia tests the waters (bad metaphor right now, but) for hugging him, estimating even odds on him being in a state where the contact would help at all. She wants to comfort him but she'll let him process if he needs that.

It once again takes him a couple of steps to process that a new event has occurred, and this time it also takes him a couple of steps after that to propagate the idea that he should react to this event, and by that point he's noticed that he's out of the water although still standing uncomfortably close to its edge, so he stops and stands there for another short moment catching up to the question of whether she is still hugging him now that he's gone a full five seconds without seeming to notice.

Well, if it's not hurting anything, she'll hug him until it starts helping or some other action seems sensible.

Teammate hug. Eelesia hug. Good hug? Yes? Probably?

He hugs back. His face is very blank and his movements are somewhat mechanical but he's definitely hugging her.

"I would like... to be home," he says slowly. "With you, in your bed. With... all of you. In our bed. And very few things happening. As few things as possible. Is this a feasible goal?"

"Of course, Laurent."

She glances at Coventina, who has re-summoned her regalia.

       "Card shows the quest complete. Guess I got it all before the Mesmers showed up."

"Oh good."

Eelesia does not want to unhug.

"Can you and Sky dress us?"

       "Sure."

Eelesia's usual purple mage outfit is at the tailor's for repairs, so today she's wearing a dark grey sundress and a thin purple jacket, which is fortunately a lot easier to put on while hugging Laurent than a tightly fitted body stocking.

Okay, that can happen, probably.

He keeps running multiple sanity checks on all his sensory input and motor planning, and everything keeps coming up fine, because all the mesmers are dead, but he keeps running them anyway. It makes him a bit slow to respond to events, but it's possible to get clothing on him and steer him toward home.

The trip back to Axel is not interrupted, and the girls all help him get there without incident.

He sits on the edge of the bed and slowly tips over sideways until he is flopped somewhat uncomfortably on top of the blankets with his legs still trailing off onto the floor. This is a suboptimal way to lie down and he should really be doing something else. Time to triple-check that impulse. Wow, this is a wildly unsustainable way for his brain to work.

"...sorry," he says. "For... having such a thoroughly useless reaction to the Mesmers."

"It's fine."

Coventina, with the other girls' help, gently strips him naked again.

"I think I might've fucked up a little, myself. When the Mesmers first latched on to me, I should've dropped into the water immediately. Instead, you all heard me and looked. And the Mesmers on my body were able to hypnotize you."

She folds and stacks Laurent's clothes and puts them aside, then casts Etheric Wardrobe again.

Eelesia also strips and helps scooch Laurent to the middle of the bed, cuddling up to him once he's there.

And Sky follows suit, stripping off her shawl and skirt and shoes and crawling naked onto Laurent between the other two girls. She's the lightest and smallest, and can fit on his chest, resting her head between his and Coventina's.

His reaction lags for a couple of seconds while he thinks through all this from multiple angles, and then he tentatively rests a hand on Sky's head to pet her.

"...if I can't trust my own thoughts and senses I can't trust anything, ever," he says. "It's exhausting but I don't know what to do. Besides immediately go out and pursue the most ruthlessly optimized leveling scheme I can come up with and pour all the resulting stat points into Sanity. Or buy an Orb of Clarity. How expensive are they?"

"We're paying 10,000 Lake a day to rent this one," Coventina says.

"Once I knew the Mesmers were there I was able to throw off their second attempt to hypnotize me just by staying focused. Your Sanity is only a couple points below mine I bet you could do the same already."

"Yes, I think I am almost certainly wildly overreacting, it's just—those were my thoughts. I should've come up with better precautions in the first place, and paid more attention to whether I was reacting appropriately to the dangers at hand, and I should probably not currently be double-checking all my trains of thought for outside influence and all my sensory input for consistency, but... it's very hard to stop."

"I don't think it was, though. Our thoughts, I mean. We were still talking to each other, right? When we finally noticed it was like, it was sort of like noticing that you're bouncing your leg? Or actually more like that you'd walked out the door without your shoes on? It felt a lot like a bout of ordinary forgetfulness. And if that's correct then experiencing it once is immunizing."

"Is it? How so?"

"Well, do you think you'll ever be able to look at a lake again without consciously or unconsciously scanning for suspiciously unsuspicious colored lights? Or if not ever again, any time in the next few years."

"...I suppose I see what you mean, but the trouble I'm having is convincing myself to stop scanning for suspiciously unsuspicious things, so..."