"You didn't know? Tintin told me you were the one who called this meeting, is he setting you up for something?"

"I knew I was gonna be meeting an assistant, I didn't know you'd be, you know -" vague gesture. "I'm gonna look so flat... I blame him completely, though. Anyway! What makes you want to work with that little maniac?"

"Oh, stop that, you're gorgeous. But, well, I have a weak spot for maniacs and he looked so excited. And, fine, I was curious about the, what were they, last time he talked about them he called them the Seven Wonders."

"Seven Mysteries! I should never have hired a non-weeb, my references all fall flat. But he is very excitable. And I'm sure at least one of the Mysteries will turn out to have perilous depths, with you on the team... okay, the last one would've anyway, but maybe one of the throwaways will too? IDK. Glad to have you onboard. Do you want a cupcake, I keep baking enough of them that the other girls can't steal them all and then remembering that I don't want surplus cupcakes."

"...sure, I'll have a cupcake. 'With me on the team'?"

Cupcake! It's tricolor-frosted, pink and purple and slightly different pink. If he deigns to have a bite, it tastes quite good, too.

"Everybody knows that when you're investigating mysteries, you need charisma more than anything. How do you think those kids and their pesky dog did it? But I'm too Velma, and Tintin's, like, a completely different genre, he's doing spacefaring YA climbing through plasma vents to restart the warp core. We need somebody who can say well, THAT happened and make the Dreamworks face. You're perfect! And you can make Tintin's copy have punctuation in it, that's important."

He has to hold his giggles back lest they cause this spotless room to become less spotless with cupcake, at least until he's swallowed this first bite, and then he's free to laugh. "The Dreamworks face. Yeah, I can do that, I think."

"Sweet. Faces all 'round."

She works her mouth a little bit, like she's trying to get a seed out of her teeth, or maybe just trying to figure out how to phrase something.

"So - I do, actually, have a vested interest in figuring out whether my subordinates are going to start kissing each other," she eventually decides to say. "It's, uh, led to problems. I totally don't mind, but I want to keep on top of it. So when you say you have a weak spot for maniacs..."

"Oh I am absolutely romantically and/or sexually interested in him, though we've, you know, only just met. But if it's up to me..." Shrug.

"Great. That is literally all I wanted or want to know."

She sighs, looking oddly tired.

"I probably don't actually need to say this, but if you ask me for relationship advice I'll bite you," she adds. "I don't know why you would, we literally met under an hour ago. But it's happened before."

"Aww, no secret cheatcodes to Tintin's heart? Little things he loves?" Pete says, grinning, but he salutes with his free hand. "Loud and clear, ma'am."

"If you need cheatcodes I'm... well, realistically I'm the best source, but you should consider having different problems," she confirms. "Because I don't do that."

Pete has the feeling that Monika got a lot more out of this meeting than he did but he's really not sure what it could possibly have been or why she wanted it in the first place, if she just wanted to say hi and give him a cupcake.

It's probably a subplot. He'll figure it out.

But for now: lunch, which he's probably somewhat late for.

It's buffet-style; late is relative.

He does have to choose who he wants to sit with, though.

He wants to sit with Ed because he hasn't seen him yet and has had a sort of upsetting morning and wants something nice and sweet.

Ed's face lights up when he approaches. He gets up and gives Pete a hug. "Pete! How's it been? Peter poached you for breakfast and it's been like you were at war, I was ready to send you letters with pressed flowers - oh I'm being very clingy, aren't I, why don't you sit and have some food."

"Very well! Somewhat distractible. I have been told that infatuation makes people stupid, and I wouldn't necessarily go that far, but my academic performance has seen better days. What about you?"

"I had a conversation with your brother that I probably need to talk to you about and then I flirted relentlessly with Tintin and then I had class and for a reason you know it was less engrossing than it could be then I ran into Tom Riddle and then I had more class and then Monika from the school paper wanted to meet me and we had some character-revealing interactions except they were character-revealing only to her which was kind of disconcerting to be on this end of and now lunch and I missed you." Did he even breathe in the middle of that sentence. He's not sure he did.

"I missed you too. Think I mentioned. So, we need to talk about your conversation with Peter? I'm interested to hear more about this Monika character afterwards, all I know about her is that she baffles the living hell out of my roommate."

"I guess maybe talk is implying too much, but it hadn't occurred to me until this morning that you might have an opinion on the fact that I am actually reasonably not unlikely to have some kind of non-platonic relationship with your older brother, plus the fact that he might have opinions on everything we did yesterday that you might want to think about."

A number of very complicated emotions scroll across Edmund's face.

"If I say I don't really think that's my business," he observes, "you will look at me like I'm insane."

"Kind of. I mean off the top of my head there's: you care deeply for him and want him to be happy and therefore whom he dates is in fact as much your business as it would be if he were a regular friend; even if you and I are compatible that doesn't mean he and I will be; you could be concerned that I'm going to be running around and playing with both of your hearts; and there's straightforward good ol' ick feelings about thinking about your family's sexualities and sex lives which will inevitably intrusively occur especially if I don't censor myself about time spent with him outside the obvious."

"I don't feel ick about Peter's hypothetical sex life," Edmund clarifies first. "My feelings are more complicated than that. I don't think you're playing with people's hearts, we've already established that you're poly. If you're not compatible you can figure that out, you're both big boys. I do want him to be happy, and that obviously means I don't want to dictate who he dates, because that would be insane."

"Alright, if you say so. I'd personally feel—well, not ick about dating the same person as one or both of my siblings, but I would have some squinty feelings. More complicated in what way?"