"Do we have to put shirts on?"

"...It would be less conspicuous."

Julien squirms back into his.

Well this sucks but okay.

Julien gets his hands back.  "You do not have a realistic chance of escaping to a place where things are better for you than this," she reminds him.

"No, ma'am.  I mean I know that."

"Good."  Then she can put them in balaclavas and lead them inside to go get checked in.  There are some armchairs in sight of the front desk where they can sit while she takes care of the transaction.

"I guess it must not be that weird in spy movie universe to go around in ski masks. Or it is weird but every sane person looks at the situation and decides not to perturb it. Makes it hard to put my face on you."

"Everything is very strange here and I don't have much idea what to think of it."  They have arms, at least; Julien lines his up with Haru's and presses against it.

That is very good. "Not literally everything is strange. Like, they speak English and stuff."

"The amount of things that match is also strange."

"I guess in a certain sense it would be less strange if this were an alternate universe where instead of primates crows had attained sapience but really either one is just 'something diverged at some point'."

"They have some brands, though.  And Christmas carols, you'd said?  That's - a net, where things keep splitting apart and coming back together, not a path that branches."

"Most Christmas carols are not that new but I guess I was not looking up dates."

"They have Coca-Cola."

"Coke's pretty old! I guess it might behoove us to check to make sure it does not contain cocaine in this universe, just in case, before we drink any?"

"Oh boy.  Haha.  Yeah."

Here's Svetka with their key cards.

Yay a key card it can go in his pocket. "Thank you. Man I'm suddenly curious about your like, Spy Finances, that must be complicated and I probably couldn't keep track of the answer though."

"Not in the lobby, please?"  To the elevator.

"I don't have much filter but you can preempt me with like whatever, I'm not picky."

"How would you like to assign each of us a nickname."

"Is something wrong with Martin and Midsummer - I guess other parties have already heard those and maybe we are trying to avoid this? What is the use case here."

"To be nicknames."

"Yes but we all already have normal names? Do we need to be further obfuscatory to someone for some reason?"