“Oh, I really like this one!” Gnome exclaimed as everyone went through a mountain of recently developed photos that had been brought into the suite by Aclysia. As to what the photos depicted, they were all different shots of Aclysia, sometimes with Beatrice in the frame, doing poses either wearing or next to numerous products. As the article line was quite expansive, both happened pretty often.

The photo the earth spirit held up was a pretty cute presentation of Aclysia in a winter outfit, a thick scarf wrapped around her head. Hands in oversized sleeves pulled up the scarf to her mouth, half-hiding her face, leaving her adoring green eyes to stare into the camera.

“You are adorable in this!” further specified the soil elemental and showed the one she meant to the weaponized maid. “How did you look so cute?”

Who cleared her throat in a clearly embarrassed way. It was really odd to see their roles reversed like that. Apparently even Aclysia could be a bit shy when they inspected a number of photos of her. “I was told to think of whatever I loved the most.”

“Let me fucking guess,” Salamander picked up another photo and stared at it for a few moments. “You thought of a perfectly clean kitchen the size of a family home?”

Aclysia had no mind to pay to sarcasm, “No, I thought of my John, as is natural.”

“I personally like this photo the most,” the Gamer voiced, holding up one of Aclysia and Beatrice together holding a salver, both of them smiling nicely for the camera, wearing their maid outfits. The actual product sold was some kind of washing detergent, but John really just liked seeing both of them smile. “What did they tell you to think about there?”

“I was given no instructions for my thoughts in that picture,” Aclysia responded with a respectful bow. “They did, however, promise that I could take home some sample products. It was the idea of free things that thusly propelled my mood.”

“I was told to copy her expression,” Beatrice added to the explanation. That it was such a perfect replication was one of the reasons why John liked that photo so much. He was a sucker for symmetry.

“Did you like going there?” John inquired as he looked through a number of different photos, just out of curiosity. Most of them were cute, some of them were sexy and just a few of them were hilarious. At least to John, seeing Aclysia with a chainsaw in her hands, posing as if it was a holy relic she had successfully lifted from the pope, was worth an unhealthy number of chuckles.

“It was an interesting part-time,” the weaponized maid proclaimed. “Were it not for my obligation, however, I would have rather spent the time at your side, Master.”

That was the expected answer, “What about you, Beatrice?”

“It was a photoshoot,” she gave the most unhelpful answer anyone received ever. It was also a statement of truth. Regardless, it was annoying.

“But did you like it?”

“Pondering,” she announced, staring ahead while she did exactly that. When she had come to a conclusion, her eyes suddenly went back to John. “Result: it was interesting to some degree. I don’t dislike being used for advertising purposes. Simply taking orders to look good was a level of pastime I can agree with. Counterpoint: appears tiring over long stretches. Would prefer to stay around and do nothing after a while. More importantly, I do share the baseline that being with you is more enjoyable.”

John hummed his understanding; this was a much better and more formulated answer, one that he could actually work with. “Not going to lie, I was thinking about using some of you girls for advertisements,” he confessed while watching Beatrice’s eyelid twitch, a gesture he had never seen from her before. “You don’t like that idea?”

“My irritation is a separate issue from your statements,” the passive maid let him know. “Do pay it no mind.”

“Sure?” John decided to get his explanation done first. “I was just thinking that messages would be paid a bit more attention to if there was a cute face attached to it.”

“Ya wanna sell your propaganda more successfully?” Rave joked, but she wasn’t even that wrong. There was no answer for her, though, as Beatrice suddenly knelt down next to the low table and picked up a number of photos.

She neatly stacked the equally sized pictures, created a number of towers that way and sighed as if she had just relieved a full bladder once she had started doing that, although there was no sign that she was stopping.

Sylph flew over and landed on one of those stacks of photos. “What are you doing? Is it fun to stack photos? Is there anything that is so great about the surface of the table that you want to see? I mean, it is pretty shiny. Shiny stuff is cool. Like glazed sugar on cakes. That’s pretty cool. Although I prefer my cakes hot and freshly baked. Those are the best cakes. Ah, but I am not allowed to eat entire cakes anymore. I get all scramble-brained when I do that.”

“You’re always scramble-brained,” Salamander mocked.

“Not true, not true, not true!” the tiny air spirit protested, waving her hands around, which threatened to topple the tower she was sitting on. Especially since she was just encouraged by the swaying. “Oh, oh, this is fun, side to side to side to side to forth to side to-“

Beatrice suddenly pinned the tall stack down with a single finger. “You will cease,” the maid spoke in her usual passive tone but with an intensity in her eyes that Sylph shut up and cowered down. “I am working. There must be order.”

“Y-yes, Miss Aclysia, sir,” Sylph raised her hand in a nervous salute, sweat drops running down her face at a comedic pace. “I will not ravage the kitchen ever again.” With that flashback to dangerous times, along with the scramble of names and everything, the thunderstorm elemental hovered straight up like a balloon that had been let go.

John raised an eyebrow as he watched Beatrice first stack all photos, then start to sub-categorize them by single and duo shots, then further break that down by product size, until the former mountain of photos was a neatly organized array of smaller stacks. Only when that was done did the passive maid rise from her kneeling position again and noticed that everyone was watching her.

“Inquiry: is something the matter?” she asked, as if nothing unusual had happened.

“Kind of?” John said. “Seems like your compulsive ordering has gotten a bit worse.”

“As my character becomes less unnaturally passive, my inhibition towards acting out the desire to adjust my surroundings to be more aligned decreases,” Beatrice stated as if that was a known fact that everyone should have been aware of already. “That chaos was also particularly bad.”

John could somewhat get that reasoning, but he nevertheless made a mental note to keep an eye on Beatrice and her future development in this regard. It seemed that this was her own developing unhealthy obsession. Aclysia wanted to make sure every woman in the world knew he was the greatest guy out there and Beatrice couldn’t stand anything being disorderly. Luckily, the weaponized maid wasn’t going to act out in any matter too crazy, while the passive sister remained unmotivated to do too much.

It was true that Beatrice was acting more ‘human’ over time, but her emotional range hadn’t really increased. Strong emotions were an immense rarity, most of the time she just hung around neutrally in a slightly good or slightly bad way. Additionally, she would still value an order higher than her own desire to adjust some placements of items around the house.

“Well, alright,” he said and Beatrice cleaned the ordered pictures off the table soon thereafter. The question naturally arose: why had there been a massive photoshoot with Aclysia in the first place? An answer to that could be found in the conversation John had with the phone on the table, or the redhead on the other end of it.

“So, that clean up the debt Aclysia had with you?”

“Absolutely,” Scarlett answered, only to then burp into the speaker in a very much unladylike fashion. “Fucking fuck, do you know how hard it was to not drink for a month? I think my liver was bored shitless the entire time. Stupid bet.”

Indeed, the bet between the bloodstained technocrat and the weaponized maid had come to an end. Scarlett had won, not touching any drugs, not even caffeine, for an entire month. The thing she had asked for had been rather tame, namely to use Aclysia as the model for a wide-spread advertising campaign. Given that she could easily attain supermodel status on looks alone, that wasn’t the stupidest thing to ask for.

“And now you’re getting drunk while chain-smoking cigarettes,” John assumed.

“Like an absolute winner,” she confirmed, her voice already betraying a level of tipsiness. “Plus I got a bunch of hot pictures of your maid now.”

“Which I don’t even know why you want them,” John tried to stitch together whatever plan she was hiding from him. That he just couldn’t get it doubly annoyed him. The press was tarring him, the loudest part of it anyway, so they were currently still in worst-case-scenario land, with no sign of John getting out of public perception in the next few days. Counter articles had been wonderfully ignored from all screeching parties.

He had to rely on Scarlett. Which was okay. If he just knew what was going on or tried to help it. Not being the master of his own fate sucked. He knew perfectly well, though, that she just revelled in her intellectual superiority over him during these moments. “I hate having schemer friends,” he announced.

“Awww, is the high and mighty Gamer threatened by a woman smarter than him?” Scarlett ridiculed him over the phone, much to his irritation but several girls’ glee, Rave and Salamander most clear of them all. “I hear people do enjoy your torment.”

“When you’re together with this guy for a year, ya enjoy every moment with him,” Rave said loud enough for the phone to pick up. “Including those in which he squirms and pouts like a baby.”

“Not a baby…” John grumbled; the sad thing was that it was his best retort in that moment. “Also: the hell you’re smarter than me.”

“Do you know for certain I’m not?”

“Well, no, Intelligence isn’t a directly translatable Stat to my own Mental Stats…” John heard the triumphant laughter from the other side, followed by the sound of a bottle getting guzzled down. It was highly doubtful that it was simply beer she was putting in her face there.

“Don’tcha worry, playeeerrrr,” Scarlett sounded progressively more drunk with every passing moment. “Ya’ll’ve something to do soon. Everything will escalate and then the trap snaps.”

“…I feel like this is something I should know about,” John suggested, feeling that this entire thing was getting way bigger than he had signed up for. All he needed was an end to the hate mob so that the council would meet with him again without fearing public outrage. Whatever Scarlett was setting up here sounded bigger.

“Would ya really be satisfied if I just fucking told ya?” Scarlett teased.

“Her slurring is getting so bad she sounds like you, Jane,” John allowed himself a little joke.

“Such a charmer of a boyfriend I have,” Rave answered in a sarcastically dry tone.

“You’re the perfect girlfriend that is relishing in my intellectual loss over here.” His tone was a copy of hers down to the letter. They started playfully fighting with hands and feet, something that she eventually won by stabbing his forehead with her toe. “Anyway, no, I wouldn’t… so you’re sure you got that under control.”

There was a sound of shattering glass. “Don’t worry aboudit.”

“What was that?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“No, I mean the glass.”

“The empdy rum boddle… Whew, my liver is really out of form… didn’t think I’d get thish drunk this quickly, better put some vodka on top!”

“That sounds like a horrible idea.” And John was infinitely sorrowful that he was not around to see the androgynous technomancer get absolutely smashed outside of her normally so collected mindset.

“Yes… know what doesn’t sound like a horrible idea right now?” Her question was followed by a series of urging vibrations from the same phone they were speaking through right now. Slowly John picked it up and could read the scrolling text, ‘You, me, a latex outfit, a bottle of oil and a riding crop.’

“Wouldn’t the latex outfit and the oil clash?”

“Mhmmmaaybe,” Scarlett said, then there was a sudden trashing sound. “Shouldn’t get so drunk around places I don’t know.”

“What… wait, you’re not home?”

“Nope, Planned Spikes headquarter, Boston, Mishter Prezzident.”

John refused to think about that name too much. Planned Spikes was the ninth most powerful company in Amacat at this point. Planned basically sounded like Plant. Plant Spikes. Thorne. The company was named Thorne. It was Scarlett’s pre-existing local company from her days before John came about and such a stupid pun. Of course, conspiracy theorist would use that to create a (oddly enough correct) connection. Like all evidence that Scarlett leaked, however, it was so stupid and required such an amount of brain bending to get to it that most people would just dismiss it.

“So you’re in Boston… which is probably why you delayed the photoshoot despite winning the bet yesterday,” John tried to tie things together. Why would Scarlett go anywhere herself? “Hey, you aren’t thinking about…”